Phantasm CS improves on Adobe Illustrator's basic color adjustment capabilities 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 permanently change the colors or dynamically alter them, so they can be edited, deleted and re-ordered as desired. The plugin is said to adhere to Adobe's user interface standards, providing comprehensive color adjustments similar to those found in Photoshop, including Brightness/Contrast, Curves, Desaturate, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Levels and Shift to Color. Four additional object selectors—Spot colors, RGB, CMYK and Greyscale bitmaps—extend user control over the color of objects available in Illustrator. Also included is a "Safe CMYK" option, compliance with Spot colors and an automatic Overprint removal option. The illustration below shows the Color Variations action at work, which generates a set of color variations based on the selected artwork.

While also available in Designer and Studio versions, Publisher is the most feature-reach to date. New is an advanced Ink Coverage tool that is said to provide improved TAC (Total Area Coverage) individual ink values. In addition, a one-click method to automatically determine advised ink coverage levels is based on the document's color profile. The Swap Channels Filters and live Effects available in Studio have been enhanced in Publisher by allowing process channels to be swapped with spot inks, in addition to copying channel data, making possible the generation of Hi-Fi color print artwork. Publisher also extends the Curves and Levels tools by adding the ability to adjust the Bitmap Alpha channel. Finally, a new Link Embedded Images function makes it possible to manually or automatically convert one or more selected embedded images into a dynamically linked/placed external Photoshop image file.

Phantasm CS Designer, Phantasm CS Studio and Phantasm CS Publisher for Mac and Windows Illustrator CS2-CS4 are priced at $82, $148 and $231 respectively and can be purchased on the Astute Graphics site. A trial version is available for download.