Lucis Art review (.psd 1/2007)

I'm not good at keeping secrets, and in this case, the secret is a juicy one! Rumor has it, digital artists who successfully market their work have been known to use the cross-platform Lucis Art plug-in to give their images a painted, colored pencil or otherworldly look, or even a combination of these effects. This results in images that stand out from the crowd.

Lucis Art was originally developed for the scientific community as a means of extracting hidden details from X-rays and other medical imagery. It sounds odd, but Lucis Art enhances both the highlights and shadows of an image at the same time, revealing details you would not see otherwise–sort of like Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight adjustment on steroids.

Lucis Art offers great flexibility in image processing, allowing you to either simply correct or totally reinterpret an image.

The Lucis Art interface is simple (the Mac version is shown here). The Effect menu offers six different filter types in eight settings: Exposure, Klimpt, Sculpture, Plaid 1-3, Whyeth and Winslow. Each menu option offers up to three additional settings: Amount, degrees (represented by radio buttons) and Mix (fade the Lucis Art effect right in the plug-in by mixing back your original image). In certain cases, you can use either Amount or the buttons, but not both.

To create my examples shown here, I started with a softly lit portrait, duplicated the Background layer 6 times, and set off to explore the various Lucis Art presets. I applied only a single Lucis Art effect to each layer; no other Photoshop filters or third-party effects were used, aside from very slight Levels adjustments as necessary.

First, Exposure. This is a quick way to balance out the tones in your image while enhancing detail throughout. Note how the image pops.

Next, Klimpt. You can recognize this unique effect immediately, because there's nothing else like it! Klimpt reminds me of a sugar rush, like eating Pixie Stix candy.

Sculpture is one of my favorite presets, as it can be used to spice up most any image, with emphasis on midtones. In this case, the settings I used created a soft yet sharp dreamy effect, almost like channel mixing (looking like one of those velvet Elvis blankets).

The Plaid preset comes in three flavors (1-3). It adds radiant horizontal and vertical lines and patterns to the image while reducing the tonal range.

Whyeth pulls the smallest details out of the image and gives it an overall dry paint brush or watercolor effect. The model's pores and skin blemishes are revealed!

Finally, Winslow uses the relative contrast of your image to mimic watercolor brushes.

As you can see, Lucis Art is capable of a wide range of totally different wonderful effects. Each preset swings wildly from one extreme to the other, depending on the settings you use, for even more creative flexibility.

Not bad for a plug-in that doesn't even need an instruction manual! Try running Lucis Art on multiple duplicated layers of the same image and exploring the variations possible via blending modes and opacity adjustments. Run Lucis Art multiple times on the same layer, as well as adding additional complementary effects from Photoshop or other plug-ins...

.psd readers can receive a 15% discount off the regular Lucis Art price of US$169 by using the "plugsnpixels" discount code upon checkout. See http://www.plugsnpixels.com/lucisart.html for more examples and a link to the order page.

by Mike Bedford