The Plugin Site

I've got a nasty example online (link below) of an extreme lighting situation: Lunchtime at the famous Farmer's Market in LA (where James Dean ate his last breakfast...). Shot with no fill flash on auto-exposure, the original is either too dark or too light with little middle ground.

I knew Lucis Art could pop open the shadows, which it did to a great degree.

Photoshop's native Shadow/Highlight also did a decent job on its own, but with less contrast/color and detail.

So! I applied Shadow/Highlight to the Lucis Art version, and got an excellent final result.

See a large version of these examples here.

Download the original unretouched camera image here.

See more Lucis Art corrected and creative-effect images here.

Lucis Art turns the image into a graphic whereas Photoshop's S/H tool still kept the photographic quality. So as a photographer I would never use Lucis Art, but as a graphic designer I would use it for that effect.

Hi Harald,

That "look" is part of Lucis Art's charm, and is usually applied for artistic reasons . Of course I could have backed it off by blending back the original (or even using the Exposure option instead of Sculpture).

Sure, but you should not compare Lucis Art with Photoshop's S/H tool if you want to create artistic effects. Photoshop's S/H tool is primarily designed for photographic and not artistic results.

True. So let's open one of those challenges where The Plugin Site members download the original and apply different techniques to it to achieve a tonally balanced result. It should be interesting to see the different workflows.