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Living colour

Posted on 16 Jun 2008 at 12:01

For designers, the arrival (at last) of comprehensive control over CMYK colour handling is cause for celebration. Tom Arah explains how it's done.

You might expect these bargain-priced filters to be marred by skimping and rough edges, but each is a comprehensive and polished tool. For example, you can load Photoshop settings, ignore spot colours, control how white and black are handled, manage overprinting and more. With the top-of-the-range Phantasm CS Studio ($195), you can view separations, overprints and ink coverage, and edit embedded bitmaps in Photoshop.

I've saved perhaps the most powerful feature till last: all Phantasm adjustments are available both from Illustrator's Filter menu, where all changes are applied permanently, or from its Effects menu where changes are applied non-destructively. This means that, unlike changes made in Live Color, these Phantasm CS effects remain fully live so that you can always recall the dialog to fine-tune colours or remove the effect and return to your original values. It's been a long haul, but after 20 years and needing Illustrator CS3 and Phantasm CS to work in tandem, it finally feels possible for designers to successfully take full control of their CMYK colour handling.