| For all the Adobe Illustrator users: |
[Sep. 21st, 2006|11:40 pm] |
This is a totally unsolicited endorsement...
Check out Phantasm CS, from Astute Graphics. It's a brand new Illustrator plug-in that basically adds all the essential color adjustment tools from Photoshop into Illustrator -- Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Desaturate, Invert and Shift to Color -- for under $40.
This plug-in makes adjusting colors as quick, easy and precise as in Photoshop -- and it affects both vector objects and embedded graphics! You can be sure that from now on, whenever the Multiplex staff is seen in a darkened theater, Phantasm CS is at work. Sure, the old way I did it worked: I dropped a gray rectangle over the art and set it to Multiply into the art below it, but when I've had characters heads overlapping the movie screen they were watching, I would have to mask out a duplicate shape so that the movie screen wasn't affected -- obviously, it had to stay behind the character and the Multiply object). And so help me god if I wanted to change that character's positioning then...
With Phantasm CS, it's just a quick -15% Brightness on the character, the background -- everything EXCEPT the lettering and the movie.
Phantasm CS's magic works on objects, fills, gradients, patterns and even embedded graphics. But it is just shy of perfection. It would benefit greatly from the ability to load and save presets (Photoshop-compatible ones, of course), realtime previews, among other things. But even without such luxuries, these powerful new tools are more than worth the asking price. I've had it installed for two days, and I can't imagine going back to drawing Multiplex without it. |
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Just as a note, more recent versions of Phantasm CS have added the ability to load and save presets and real-time previews, and I love it more than ever! | |
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