Advertise here via BSA

Last week, the guys over at Astute Graphics gave me the opportunity to review a copy of Phantasm CS Studio. For those of you who haven’t heard of Phantasm CS, Phantasm CS is a suite of plugins for Adobe Illustrator that allow you to manipulate colors much like you can in Photoshop. One of the big complaints about the default Live Color feature in Illustrator is how complex and sometimes confusing it can be. Phantasm CS makes color manipulation in Illustrator a cinch. I was very impressed with this suite of plugins and would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to get more out of Adobe Illustrator.

About Phantasm CS

I have to admit, that one of the primary reasons this plugin caught my eye was the addition of the halftone feature. If you’ve ever tried to create halftones in Illustrator, you would probably agree how difficult they can be to do. Phantasm CS makes this process incredibly easy. In fact, with Phantasm CS, you can create halftone patterns with just a few clicks.

After playing with the halftone plugin for a while, I finally started messing around with some of the color adjustment filters. I opened up some old artwork of mine and started making some minor adjustments. I started out adjusting the hue/saturation, and then moved on to brightness/contrast, curves, invert, etc. If any of you guys are Photoshop users, those adjustments might sound a bit familiar. In fact, most of those adjustments are present in Photoshop but for whatever reason are missing from Illustrator. Phantasm CS fills that void and gives you all the control of Photoshop but with all the benefits of Illustrator.

If you would like more information on Phantasm CS, visit their new website at AstuteGraphics.com. They have tons of video tutorials that describe their products in great detail.

Pricing

Phantasm CS comes in 3 editions; Phantasm CS, Phantasm CS Designer and Phantasm CS Studio. Each edition is very reasonably priced between $37 – $132.

Final Thoughts

This might be one of the best and most useful Illustrator plugins that I have ever used. If you feel let down by the default color manipulation tools of Illustrator or have been dying to figure out how complex vector halftone patterns are created then I would seriously suggest purchasing this software. It will fundamentally change the way that you work with Illustrator and give you the color control that you’ve always wanted.

Advertise here via BSA

Fluid Mask 3, which functions both as a stand-alone program and plug-in, has become the professionals’ choice for image extraction by providing an easy-to-use interface to power a complex technical process, specially suited to masking complicated images, such as wisps of human hair and leaves on a tree. Fluid Mask 3 separates an image into puzzle-like pieces, allowing the editor to simply paint in the portions of the image to be kept or deleted.  The software’s unique “Smart Blending” capability and its powerful edge detection system make Fluid Mask 3 an intuitive workflow resource that no photographer or graphic designer should be without.

The Details

Fluid Mask 3 offers the most powerful and accurate image extraction on the market. Fluid Mask 3 is available for both Windows and Mac based operating systems, and functions as a standalone application or as a fully compatible plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS4 as well as all previous versions.

About Vertus

Vertus is the graphics and imaging software division of Heligon, a technology business specializing in image data interpretation. Heligon’s groundbreaking technology uses complex algorithms to mimic the way the eye and brain perform visual processing so that complex shapes and colors can be recognized within images. Heligon licenses its technology to market leaders in industries including design and graphics, printing and video. More information on Vertus can be found here.

Vertus Announced New Pricing Yesterday

At $149, the Professional Choice for Separating Complicated Images from Their Backgrounds Now More Accessible to the Growing Community of Hobbyist Photographers and Designers

London, U.K. & Boston M.A. – December 8, 2008 – Vertus, Inc., a graphics and imaging software developer that creates simple and highly specialized software solutions, today announced that its award-winning Fluid Mask 3 image extraction tool, the  professionals’ choice for image masking, will now be available for $149.00, a savings of almost 40% from its original cost.

The proliferation of high quality cameras and the ever-growing community of hobbyist photographers looking to perform expert-level editing tasks have led to the introduction of numerous new image editing suites which provide basic image extraction tools.  Despite improvements in this area, these tools cannot match the power, accuracy, and efficiency of Fluid Mask 3.  The product’s new price will enable this larger pool of photographers to access the unique capabilities of Fluid Mask 3 at its most affordable level.

A fully functional free trial of Fluid Mask 3 is available for immediate download.

Final Thoughts

• Totally worth the new price drop
• Learning curve is quite easy – medium
• Saves plenty of time for those “hard to edit” photos
• Great tool to have for any designer/photographer
• One of best plugins I’ve used for Photoshop
• Recommend at the very least trying the “free trial“

Advertise here via BSA

Photoshop Actions to Boost Your Productivity

This is part 3 (and final) in “The ultimate photoshop resource list”. In case you missed it, you can also read part 1 on photoshop brushes & part 2 on patterns and textures.

What are actions you ask?

An action is a series of tasks that you play back on a single file or a batch of files – menu commands, palette options, tool actions, and so on. You can create an action that changes the size of an image, applies a filter to the image for a particular effect, and then saves the file in the desired format.

Want to create your own actions?

I highly recommend creating your own for projects, it saves a lot of time for repetitive tasks.

Veerle has a great tutorial on this.

The List:

Adobe Exchange

Reynsphoto.com

Adobe Evangelists

FinesseFX

Addicted to Design

pstutorialsblog

Digital Darkroom

Mayhem Studios

DeviantArt

PhotoshopSupport

AtnCentral

TurningTurnip

Elated

PanosFX

PhotoEffects