RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: Powerful and creative colour handling add-on for Adobe Illustrator - and amazing value

When thinking of add-on filters most users would immediately think of Photoshop but there’s another very important, and very different, platform: the vector-based Adobe Illustrator.

In fact in many ways Illustrator provides the most powerful environment in which to appreciate the benefits that add-ons can offer. This is because Illustrator not only allows you to apply effects permanently to imported images via its Filters menu, but also non-destructively via its Effects menu. In particular this means that you can always fine-tune your effect at a later point simply by double-clicking on its listing in Illustrator’s Appearances palette. Even better, you can build up combined effects by applying multiple fills, outlines and filters and save these as styles that can then be instantly applied to other objects. Best of all, you can apply filter effects to vector objects as easily as you can to imported bitmaps so combining the editability and control of vector handling with the more creative possibilities offered by bitmaps.
Unfortunately applying effects within Illustrator has always had two major problems. Firstly by no means all Photoshop filters add-ons work within Illustrator as, to do so, these must support a more recent and more exacting version of the Adobe specification. However, between Illustrator’s in-built range of artistic filters borrowed from Photoshop and those third-party effects that do work (notably the KPT Collection, Virtual Painter and the various Alien Skin effects) it is possible to build up a very effective creative arsenal.
The second problem is baffling. For some reason the most important and most basic effect of all - colour correction – is off bounds. Say you’re creating an undersea image. You can import a PNG file of a fish with transparency for example and create dozens of overlying copies to create a shoal but to make the illusion more believable you really want to be able to tweak the colour of each fish – and it’s just not possible. It’s bizarre that Illustrator has never offered such a core capability but it’s even stranger and more frustrating that there’s no third-party filter that does the trick – and believe me I’ve spent many hours looking for one (incidentally the best I came up with was the commendable freeware HSLPlus from www.mehdiplugins.com)
That’s why I was delighted when UK company, Astute Graphics, got in touch to say that it had just released a new dedicated colour correction add-on for Illustrator: Phantasm CS. And it couldn’t be simpler. Seven new filters - Brightness/Contrast, Curves, Desaturate, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Levels and Shift to Color - are added to both Illustrator’s Filters and Effects menus and each does exactly what you’d expect. Apply the Levels effect to a copy of the fish PNG for example and you can quickly create a subtle tonal variation based on the image’s histogram; apply the Hue/Saturation effect and you can instantly create what looks like a totally different multi-coloured species.
Even better, although its effects can be applied to imported bitmaps, Phantasm CS isn’t actually a Photoshop-compatible bitmap filter at all - it’s a true vector-based Illustrator filter. This means that with Illustrator’s vector objects it’s not working with a rasterized bitmap to apply its corrections, it really is adjusting the underlying specified colours. Expand a gradient to which you’ve applied a hue shift as a live effect for example and you’ll find that each of the individual gradient stops has been updated (you can even recolour gradient meshes in a similar way though not non-destructively). Phantasm CS can even apply the colour changes intelligently – honouring spot colours for example and avoiding CMYK overinking by moving colour to the black plate.
This really is very powerful. If you’ve spent hours coming up with a fully scalable, pin-sharp, gradient-based vector red rose, for example, now you can create a yellow version in seconds. In fact whatever work you’ve produced, Phantasm CS lets you quickly explore colour-based variations. It’s such central power, massively boosting both productivity and creative possibilities, that once you’ve seen it in action it’s difficult to know why Illustrator doesn’t offer similar functionality itself. It certainly makes Phantasm CS a must have addition for any Illustrator CS or CS2 user – especially as it only costs $39.

EASE OF USE 4/6
FEATURES 5/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 6/6
OVERALL 5/6