Lucis Guru - The place to find the best tips on how to use Lucis Pro 6

Faux Pencil Effect by Tom Caldwell, Coff Harbour, Australia.

Basically Tom’s method involves desaturating the image, then adjusting brightness/contrast to +150 to remove image detail, then processing the image with Lucis Pro 6 to bring some detail/graininess back. Finally you clean up the faux-pencil image using Photoshop (dodging, burning and/or erasing), which can take some time. Tom also provided a second method that I have been experimenting with on images without people. Before you adjust the brightness of the image you process the image with Lucis to increase the detail. An example of this is variation shown after the first example.

Click on any image to see a high resolution version.


1. Original Image by Tom Caldwell. Carol Furtado, Lead Female Dancer, "Merchants of Bollywood" Dance Spectacular. The high resolution version is 5.9 MB.	2. Desaturated Image. Use Image-Adjust-Desaturate in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to create this image. The high resolution version is 4.7 MB.

3.Adjust the brightness of the image to remove detail. Select Image then Adjust then Brightness/Contrast. Move the Brightness slider to +150 and click OK. Note that if you are working with an underexposed image you may have to adjust the brightness a second time to remove enough detail. The high-resolution version is 2.9 MB.	4. Process the image with Lucis to increase detail. Also use the Mix Slider soften the Lucis image if preferred. In this case the the Smooth Detail slider was set to 1 and the Enhance Detail slider was moved to 101, and the Mix slider was moved to 80% Lucis image/20% original image. Click on the image to view high resolution version is 4.1 MB.
5. The final image is shown to the right. The image was cropped and cleaned up use dodge, burn and the eraser tool in Photoshop. A high-resolution version of this image is not available.
The next image example I desatured the image, processed the image with Lucis Pro 6 first to increase detail, adjusted the brightness to +150 and finally processed the image with Lucis again. This method typically brings out too many flaws/shadows for people so I used this method on images without people. Click on any image to see a high-resolution version.

6. Original Image. High resolution version is 3.3 MB.	7. Desaturated Image. High resolution version is 2.6 MB.

8. Processed the image with Lucis, the Smooth Detail slider set to 1 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 51, and the Mix With Original Image slider moved to 50%. High resolution version is 4.2 MB.	9. Adjusted brightness to +150 to remove image detail. High resolution version is 3.1 MB.

10. Processed the image with Lucis a second time, the Smooth Detail slider set to 1 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 101, and the Mix With Original Image slider moved to 80% Processed/20% Original. I did not do any cleanup on this image except use level Adjust in Photoshop.. It was not until I created this image that I noticed the plane to the left of the lighthouse. The high resolution version is 4.0 MB.
Below is another example where I followed the same procedure. I did not do any cleanup except adjust the contrast using Level Adjust in Photoshop. This is a picture of Troy, my friend's dog. Click on the image to view a high resolution version. Click here to view a high resolution version of the original image.