New features in Phantasm CS are Black/White colour cut-off, advanced overprint control, the possibility to define rich black directly or visually, Auto Rasterise, and Gradient Accuracy. Especially the latter is what I think the most powerful improvement.

What Phantasm CS does is cutting working time of users of both Illustrator and Photoshop in half, by delivering almost exact duplicate Photoshop filters for Illustrator. An example is the Brightness/Contrast Filter. This filter does not exist in Illustrator, but Phantasm CS has such a setting that works exactly the same as in Photoshop.

Phantasm CS can be used both as Filter and Effect in Illustrator. The Photoshop functions it duplicates for Illustrator can be saved as Photoshop Curves file, Photoshop Curves Map file, Photoshop HSL file, and Photoshop Levels file. These files can be loaded and used in both Illustrator --through the Phantasm CS plug-in-- and Photoshop (natively).

The result is considerable time savings and an accurate workflow, as designers can apply the same effects in both applications without having to guess which settings will generate the same results. Of course, some functionality does not work in identical ways in Illustrator and Photoshop, but most of the time they do. Where they don’t, the developer has taken care to make the differences almost unnoticeable.

The most powerful function of Phantasm CS must be Accurate Gradient Adjustment, an option buried in the Advanced Options of each dialogue. The accurate gradient adjustment allows users to select a maximum number of gradient steps. Because of the differences between Photoshop and Illustrator, gradients don’t necessarily look the same when you leave the colour tweening to the application instead of explicitly telling the application to use x number of steps in-between the extreme colours.

This improvement by itself makes Phantasm CS 2 worth the upgrade price. The overall value of this set of plug-ins hasn’t changed from version 1. It still is a time-saver and a workflow enhancer, making the simultaneous use of Photoshop and Illustrator much more painless than without.

If you regularly use these two programs together and for “synchronised” design, then do yourself a favour and at least try Phantasm CS 2.