By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, March 17, 2008 - 4:13:00
Pros: Separation and Ink Coverage capabilities early in the workflow, ease-of-use, parallel colour handling between Photoshop and Illustrator, image editing for embedded images
Contras: None I can come up with

http://www.phantasmcs.com
Score:

Illustrator often being used for creating brochures and other printable media, the question crops up: when do you need to see how your design will do on its output medium? Early on in the design process, or as the final check --when the file has been converted into PDF already? The latter is the easiest on the designer; he or she doesn’t have to know anything about prepress details such as Total Area Coverage (TAC), also known as Total Ink Coverage.

Astute Graphics developed Phantasm CS, an Illustrator plug-in. Originally intended as a system that was capable of maintaining an almost one-on-one similarity between Illustrator and Photoshop when it comes to colour manipulation, Phantasm CS Designer and Phantasm CS Studio --the newly released versions of this plug-in-- now also deliver prepress capabilities to designers.

Graphic designers don’t want to be confronted with prepress functionality, unless it’s child’s play to work with concepts such as TAC and separations. After having played around with Phantasm CS Studio, I can safely say, Astute Graphics has succeeded in building in those typical prepress capabilities in a way that even a four year old must understood. The benefits is some considerable cost savings as “defects” in the design can be spotted early on in the workflow, way before these design choices make it into a PDF. Another benefit is that designers can be given a couple of “rules” to follow, so their creations can meet tighter deadlines.

Although Phantasm CS Studio won’t make preflighting the PDF useless, it comes close, and when designers follow the guidelines and check their work with the Ink Coverage and Separations modules regularly, the preflight check of the resulting PDF must not be more than a formality.

Phantasm CS Studio Handles Colour Effects, Ink Coverage Information, Separations Preview, and More

I will cover Phantasm CS Studio only. It has all the features of the other Phantasm CS plug-ins, with additionally the Quick Preview module that holds the Separations and Ink Coverage items, an Edit/Update Image module, and Spot Colour control in Curves and Levels.

The Phantasm CS plug-in still handles colour manipulation very much alike what you’ll find in Photoshop, i.e. Curves and Levels, Saturation, Desaturation, etc. As with the previous versions, the plug-in allows for a unified approach to colours in both Illustrator and Photoshop. The Phantasm CS Designer plug-in is a step up from the standard plug-in. It additionally offers Duotones and Halftones, Ink Channel Swap, and Temperature and Tint Effects or Filters --all Phantasm CS capabilities exist as Filters or Effects.

The Studio version is the most complete one. The Designer version will appeal to individually working professional designers, while the Studio version will also appeal to designers who are working in teams whose work have to comply with specific rules for output.

Phantasm CS Studio’s most spectacular module is undoubtedly the Halftone module. That one enables you to quickly create halftones from anything you throw at it, and it allows you to use much any sort of dot to create the halftone. These include symbols, characters, etc. You can have these “dots” arranged in the typical halftone pattern, but also in FM (stochastic) patterns following Bayer Dither or Floyd-Steinberg patterns.

The results are simply stunning, especially when considering that it takes only a couple of clicks inside a dialogue window to get these effects.

More interesting in Phantasm CS Studio --but less spectacular-- is the handling of spot colours. Spot colours such as those in the Pantone Libraries are handled differently by Phantasm CS Studio than other colours. In Curves and Levels, you can only change their tints, not the colour itself. You can also totally ignore spot colours or have them overprinted in different ways.

To prepare for print, Phantasm CS Studio has full separation capabilities. This means you can either see quickly generated separations or full-scale separations, complete with press marks. The separations module automatically generates a new window with a locked version of your document for you. That window is not open to editing, but only to control (and print, obviously). The separations module shows you how your artwork will look like when output to the different ink plates used in CMYK or n-colour printing.

Prepress Controls for Illustrator Designers

Even more interesting is the Ink Coverage capability. This module shows you the TAC of your design in a clear and easy to understand graphical representation. The ink levels are shown with colours on your design and each colour represents an ink coverage shown in the dialogue window. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is --see the screenshots to find out for yourself how easy this window has been set up. You can see at a glance whether your ink coverage will be high, too high, or anywhere in-between.

Phantasm CS Studio has an image editing/updating feature for bitmap images that you embed in Illustrator files. This module enables you to edit the original image in Photoshop, despite being embedded instead of linked. Very useful, and very time saving.

The other capabilities Phantasm CS Studio provides for are all easy to use and improve the efficiency of working in an environment where Illustrator and Photoshop live next to each other, while the designer has the responsibility to tune colours so they hardly differ regardless whether they’ve been adjusted in Photoshop or in Illustrator.

Whereas previous versions of Phantasm CS Studio were rather limited by the latter, the newest version that’s been released now offers productivity as well as creativity features. I’m inclined to give the productivity features more weight in my assessment of the plug-in than the creativity functionality, although I must admit I found it hard to stop playing with the Halftone and Duotone effects.