From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

Adjust colors with filters and effects - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

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Adjust colors with filters and effects

- [Instructor] With the Phantasm plugin from Astute Graphics you can make color adjustments to your illustrator art work using familiar photoshop like tools including Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and more. And the best part is these adjustments can be totally non destructive. Your vector artwork remains vector and you can change or remove effects at any time via the appearance panel. So, lets check it out. The first thing to know is that you can find the Phantasm commands in a few different places like under Object, Filters, Phantasm, and also under Effect, Phantasm. And while the same list of choices appears in both places it's important to understand that they do not function the same way. Filters make permanent changes to the colors in your file while effects can always be changed or removed. Let me show you what I mean. So here in my file I have two identical sets of butterflies. I'll select the group on the left and I'll choose Object, Filters, Phantasm, Hue/Saturation and in the dialogue box I have three sliders for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness which are very similar to what exists in Photoshop. I can edit all colors in the selection or I can target specific ones and also in the options I can choose whether or not to apply the filter to Fill, Strokes, Text, and Embedded Images. So Let's make a change here. I'll drag the Hue slider all the way to the left and I'll make sure that Preview is selected here so I can actually see the change and all the Hue shifts are there inverted. Red becomes cyan, yellow becomes blue, and so on. Right now the Saturation is all the way to the right, but if I drag it to the left I can de saturate these colors a little bit, or all the way, and I can make the image darker or lighter. So to make a big change here I'll select Colorize, I'll set the Hue to one eighty, I'll set the Saturation to about fifty, and the Lightness down to say negative ten and click okay. And with the group selected I'll open the Appearance panel, and the only control here I have is Opacity. I can't easily go back and adjust those colors. Now select the group on the right, and this time I'll go to the Effect menu, and choose Phantasm, Hue/Saturation, and I'll apply the exact same values as before. I'll select colorize, set the hue to one eighty, Saturation to fifty, and Lightness to negative ten, and click okay. And so now the two sets of butterflies look identical, but if I select the one on the right, that's the one I applied the Effect too, I can go back to the Appearance panel, and now I have controls for Phantasm, Hue/Saturation. If I click that, I bring back the dialogue box, and I can make any changes that I want to. So for example I could change the Hue to say three hundred, and get purple butterflies. So I'll leave that as is, click okay. Also note in the Appearance panel I can just click Visibility icon and go back to the original look that I had. I'll turn it back on. Also note that I can go back to the Effect menu and apply another Phantasm effect on top of the Hue/Saturation. So lets do that, Effect, Phantasm, and lets do Brightness/Contrast. I'll set the Brightness to twenty, and the Contrast to say fifty, and click okay. And I could apply as many of these effects as I wanted always with the ability to edit them, or rearrange their stacking order, by dragging the Effects icon which will also change the results I get. So here I'll drag Brightness/Contrast above Hue/Saturation and the look changes. I'll put it back the way it was. Note that none of this flexibility is available to me when I apply Phantasm commands as Filters. Also note that another way you can apply Phantasm commands as effects is to us the Effects menu at the bottom of the Appearance panel. So I could add a third effect by choosing Phantasm, and this time I'll pick Shift to Color, And I'll shift all the colors towards red by say thirty percent and change that purple color. Now another thing you can do with some effects is to save them as separate files that you can apply to other documents or share with other people, just by going to the dialogue box, here I'll open it from the Appearance panel, and clicking the Save button, and I'll just name this Butterfly, and put in on the desktop. Then later on I, or someone else, could open the Hue/Saturation dialogue box, click the load button right here, and reuse that effect without having to recreate it from scratch. If you ever want to make your effects permanent you can do so by choosing Object, Expand Appearance, and you saw the change here in the Appearance panel. I no longer have Access to all those controls. I'm going to undo, by pressing Command+Z, or Control+Z, and make my effects live again, and show one more thing, which is how Phantasm effects can be saved in graphics styles and applied to other artwork. All I need to do is select my artwork with effects applied, as I have here, go to the Graphics Styles panel, and hold opt or alt, and click on the new graphics style button. This gives me a chance to name my graphics style, I'll just call this Butterfly, then for example I can go back to the Appearance panel, delete all of these to bring the butterflies back to their original appearance and then use my Graphics Style to change their appearance. So in this movie we looked at how you can adjust colors in Illustrator with the Astute Graphics Phantasm plug-in. You can use familiar commands from Photoshop like Brightness/Contrast, Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and more either as Filters or Effects. With Filters you change your artwork permanently, with Effects you maintain total flexibility since the underlying artwork is unchanged and you can always adjust, remove, or combine Effects in the Appearance panel, and you can also save Phantasm Effects in Graphics Styles and as separate files that you ,or someone else, could load into your documents to apply Effects without having to recreate them from scratch.

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