phantasm cs

Review: Phantasm CS plugin for Adobe Illustrator

• George Coghill
• Aug 19 , 2010

Not many Adobe Illustrators are aware of the plug-in functionality of Adobe Illustrator. I don’t believe it’s promoted very well. There’s not a good one-stop shop to find plug-ins in one place, with reviews and user feedback. And it’s a shame, because there are many killer plug-ins out there for Illustrator.

Today I want to introduce you to a plugin that in some ways goes beyond my notion of a plug-in, since it adds so many features that you wouldn’t ever expect to be able to do within Adobe Illustrator: Phantasm CS .

Developed by Astute Graphics , Phantasm CS can best be summed up by saying it offers Photoshop-esque functionality to Illustrator. Want to apply Levels? Check. Need to access the Curves? Got it. Need to adjust Hue/Saturation? Bingo.

Phantasm CS is available for both Mac and Windows running Adobe Illustrator CS2, CS3, CS4 or CS5, and offers the user an insane array of extremely well-implemented features that you may have since long given up on having within Illustrator. To be honest, I haven’t used Phantasm CS very much because my mind says “you can’t do that in Illustrator”. With Phantasm CS, you can.

The main feature set that is available across all three versions includes the following:

• Brightness/Contrast
• Duotone (including monotone, tritone and quadtone)
• Halftone (vector)
• Hue/Saturation/Lightness
• Colorize mode
• Shift to Color
• Swap Channels
• Temperature/Tint

Applying any of these is easy enough: select the art you want to tweak, then head to the Effects menu and then to the Phantasm CS sub-menu. From there you select the effect and a dialog box comes up, with the option for basic or advanced settings.

Convert your art to grayscale, whip up a color vector halftone (seriously!), convert your colors to a duotone, adjust levels, curves, brightness/contrast — everything you think you need to do in Photoshop is now at your fingetips in Illustrator and remains editable vector art. It’s freaking cool.

And the effects don’t stop at vector art, you can also edit and tweak embedded images if you spring for the Studio or Publisher version upgrades.

If you are a seasoned Illustrator user, trust me you will have a tough time getting used to the fact that you can do all of this right within Illustrator. As I mentioned above, your brain will tell you “can’t do that” and you will need to re-learn that you now have the capability. That’s probably the biggest learning curve for Phantasm CS.

Phantasm CS has a trial version which gives you basic Brightness/Contrast control as either a Filter or Live Effect. This trial version does not expire and any Brightness/Contrast Live Effects saved with your file remain completely editable in both the trial and full version.

Astute Graphics has an extensive features page on their site so you can learn in-depth about everything Phantasm CS has to offer. Pricing starts at just £49.00 (approximately $75/€58) and for what you get, this seems more than reasonable.

I highly recommend you head over to the site, download the trial and give it a whirl. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

• Categorized: Graphic Design
• Tagged: Illustrator , Adobe

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Phantasm CS Illustrator Plugin Updated

Phantasm CS improves on Adobe Illustrator ‘s basic color adjustment options and works with gradients, meshes, tweens, bitmaps, Live Trace and Live Paint, with all color adjustments available as Filters and Live Effects. With this approach, users can permenantly change the colors or dynamically alter them, so they can be edited, deleted and re-ordered as desired.

New in version 1.5 is the ability to load and save Photoshop-compatible color adjustment settings files for Curves, Hue/Saturation and Levels. Related to this is the improvement of the Hue/Saturation Filter and Live Effect controls to provide precise control over which color ranges are adjusted.

Phantasm CS 1.5 for Windows and Mac Illustrator CS and CS2 can be purchased for $37.50 on the Astute Graphics site . Trial versions are also available for download.

Source : graphics.com

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Phantasm CS rocks Adobe Illustrator

Where most plugins have the goal of creating artwork for you, Phantasm CS is more of a production tool in that it’s main set of tools involves the ability to adjust colors by Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Curves, Levels and more. But Phantasm CS doesn’t completely leave you out in the cold when it comes to cool “design” features. The Halftone tools is uber-cool if you ask me, but I’ll get into that later.

All the color control tools you come to expect of a professional design package are in Phantasm CS. In the past, when you wanted to take your carefully crafted vector art from full color to a spot-color duotone, you had one choice – waste time and hard drive space bringing it into Photoshop to do the conversion, save the file, then re-import back into Illustrator. It was a tedious process at best. I say “was” because with Phantasm CS, you can adjust the levels, curves, brightness & contrast, hue/saturation and more of your vector objects right in Illustrator as though they were bitmaps in Photoshop. And best of all, the vector objects remain editable .

And if you happen to have presets already saved in Photoshop for things like duotones levels, curves, etc., you’ll be happy to know that Phantasm CS can import them just as you can in Photoshop – very handy! Phantasm CS doesn’t stop with vector objects though, you can also apply the filters to text and embedded images, allowing even more time savings and creativity. And if you’re looking to customize only portions of your objects, you can select to apply the filters only to the fill, stroke or both. Now for the uber-cool part. Whereas standard color-adjustment tools such Curves and Levels don’t fundamentally alter the artwork, the Halftone filters and effects reconstruct the artwork to produce some really cool results.

The Halftone filter takes your vector objects and gives you the ability to apply halftone effects such as dots, squares, lines, radials and even letters to your image in a highly customizable fashion. You not only have control over the shape/style of the halftone, but you can set it to be monochrome or full color. You can adjust the size, shape and density of the dots, as well as the angle, scale and blend of the dots. This is one of those filters that you could spend a lot of time just playing around with, and get different results every time.

Phantasm CS comes in three flavors with a tiered pricing system; Phantasm CS – $45, Phantasm CS Designer – $95, and Phantasm CS Studio – $175. Which version you buy depends on what you want included in the package. The entry-level set includes the basic color-adjustment tools.

Designer includes everything in the basic set, plus the duotone, halftone, temperature/tint effect and swap channels filters.

The Studio version includes all of the above, plus the output preview, separations and in-line image editing capabilities. If your design environment is primarily Adobe Illustrator, the full Studio version is a bargain. If you mostly import your artwork into Adobe InDesign before outputting, then the Designer version is most likely adequate for your needs. If you’re uncertain about what you need, a free trial of the Studio version is available from Astute Graphics.

All three versions of Phantasm CS work with Illustrator CS, CS2 and CS3 for Windows and Mac. Overall, Phantasm CS is probably the most useful plugin set I’ve ever come across for any version of Adobe Illustrator. It’s tools are immediately useful for any designer who works in Illustrator and the pricing is quite reasonable.

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Phantasm CS Studio

COLOR-ADJUSTMENT PLUG-IN FOR ILLUSTRATOR

Studio’s prepress options are so important that I wonder why it took a third-party company to add the features to Illustrator (now in its 13th version). Because of space constraints, we’ll focus on the new Studio features, but I recommend a trip to the website to review the CS and Designer features (and to get a demo). Be sure to check out the new halftone feature—it’s fun to play with.

Studio adds the ability to edit embedded images in Photoshop (or another editing program) and save the changes back to the file or to extract the image completely. You can also view separations right in the original document or create a press-ready file complete with crop/registration marks and color bars. When performing the latter, a new document is created, leaving the original intact. The new document is flattened and the objects separated into process and spot-color layers. You can go a step further and split the (new) file into separate grayscale layer separations. Other useful prepress features include the ability to highlight overprinted objects and TIC (total ink coverage) areas.

My only complaint is minor: I wish the separations feature had an option to resize the artboard automatically to include the added marks and bars. — David Creamer

PRICE: $175 FROM: Astute Graphics Limited WEB: www.phantasmcs.com RATING: 5

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Phantasm CS Designer

Developer's description.

All the color control tools you come to expect of a professional design package can now be found in Adobe Illustrator(R) thanks to the Phantasm CS range. Add the ability to adjust colors by Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Curves, Levels and more. Each tool has a familiar user interface and the major tools allow settings exchange with Adobe Photoshop(R).

Each tool adjusts color to a professional level catering for RGB and CMYK documents and handling any spot colors correctly. By applying the color change as a live Effect, it is possible to adjust, combine, re-stack and remove any changes at any stage of the design process.

Advanced options available on all relevant filters and effects gives professionals the ability to ensure exact print-ready results. Options include "Safe CMYK" ensuring ink levels comply with document color settings, overprint removal, rich to pure black conversions, and more.

With the introduction of Phantasm CS Designer, new filters and effects have been introduced to provide additional creativity options.

Whereas standard color-adjustment tools such Curves and Levels don't fundamentally alter the artwork, simply the colors, the Duotone and Halftone filters and effects reconstruct the artwork to produce wonderful results. Duotones (which also refer to monotone, tritone and quadtone) are most commonly found in Adobe Photoshop(R); it is now available natively in Illustrator with the ability to modify all embedded objects including vector, text and images whilst maintaining all vector/bitmap attributes. Allowing a mix of process and spot colors, the resultant artwork is high quality commercial print-ready.

The Halftone filter/effect produces a range of stunning vector-based results, from standard dot types to custom Illustrator Symbols-based creations. Faithful to the original artwork (RGB or CMYK including spot colors), the level of adjustments possible ensures creative freedom.

Full Specifications

What's new in version 1.0.

In addition to Phantasm CS color adjustment Filters and Effects:

• Duotone Filter and Effect
• Vector Halftone Filter and Effect
• Swap Channels Filter and Effect
• Temperature/Tint Filter and Effect

Operating Systems

• Adobe Illustrator CS, CS2 or CS3
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista
• Mac OS X v.10.3.4 through v.10.5 version also available
• 512Mb, although 1Gb RAM is recommended(up to 4Gb recommended when producing complex full separations using Phantasm CS Studio)
• Only 2MB of free hard disc space is required to install any Phantasm CS edition; however a spare 200MB is recommended to operate Illustrator.
• Screen resolution of 1024 x 768 is an absolute minimum. A higher resolution is recommended.

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Synonyms of phantasm

• as in illusion
• as in apparition
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Thesaurus Definition of phantasm

Synonyms & Similar Words

• hallucination
• castle in the air
• castle in Spain
• ignis fatuus
• fabrication
• visualization
• will - o' - the - wisp
• cloud - cuckoo - land
• Shangri - la

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

• materialization
• poltergeist
• familiar spirit
• doppelganger
• doppelgänger

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Thesaurus Entries Near phantasm

phantasmagoria

Cite this Entry

“Phantasm.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/phantasm. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.

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synonyms for phantasm

Antonyms for phantasm.

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How to use phantasm in a sentence

A phantasm is that which, not being a true counterpart of reality, is yet so like it as to be mistaken for reality.

His eyes stared wonderingly at the grotesque face like a lingering phantasm of fevered dreams.

Was all this nothing,—a dream, a splendid phantasm , to be rent away like a crimson cloud?

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate.

At times faith grows faint, and I think it all a delusion—a phantasm —a dream.

Choose the synonym for steep

• precipitous

Words Related To phantasm

• bump in the night
• hallucination

apparitions

• bump in the nights
• hallucinations
• evil spirit
• castle in the air
• figment of imagination
• fool's paradise
• imagination
• pie in the sky
• woolgathering
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an apparition or specter.

a creation of the imagination or fancy; fantasy.

a mental image or representation of a real object.

an illusory likeness of something.

Origin of phantasm

• Sometimes fan·tasm

synonym study For phantasm

Other words for phantasm, words nearby phantasm.

• phanerophyte
• Phanerozoic
• phantasmagoria
• phantasmagoric
• phantasmagory

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use phantasm in a sentence

A phantasm is that which, not being a true counterpart of reality, is yet so like it as to be mistaken for reality.

His eyes stared wonderingly at the grotesque face like a lingering phantasm of fevered dreams.

Was all this nothing,—a dream, a splendid phantasm , to be rent away like a crimson cloud?

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate.

At times faith grows faint, and I think it all a delusion—a phantasm —a dream.

British Dictionary definitions for phantasm

/ ( ˈfæntæzəm ) /

an illusory perception of an object, person, etc

(in the philosophy of Plato) objective reality as distorted by perception

Derived forms of phantasm

• phantasmal or phantasmic , adjective
• phantasmally or phantasmically , adverb

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012