Creating a Lucis-like effect with Lightroom

There is a popular plugin for Photoshop called LucisArt which lets you enhance details in bright and dark areas of an image simultaneously. It’s a look that is best exemplified by their Whyeth effect, which looks almost like a what happens to an image when you apply an HDR (or High Dynamic Range) technique.

While nothing can match the real deal, you can do a good job of reproducing the LucisArt Whyeth look in Adobe Lightroom. Bring up a picture into the Develop view and perform the following steps on it.

Remember to trust yourself… this will look ugly before it looks good.

• Under Basic adjustments, slide Recovery to 100%
• Fill Light up to 100%
• Blacks to about 20-50, will adjust more later.
• Contrast to 100%
• Clarity to 100%
• Vibrance to 100%
• Now drop your Saturation to -20 and bump it down as needed to get rid of some of the gaudy color we’ve introduced.
• Go back and play with adding some Blacks and adjust Exposure as needed.
• If one particular color is overpowering, you can visit the HSL palette and adjust it’s saturation.

At this point, you can continue manipulating it by adding noise reduction or some lens correction to add a nice vignette. You can also adjust the Saturation and Vibrance sliders to get the right amount of color. Because this is an artistic look – there’s no right and wrong way to adjust the settings, but like with any effect, too much and you can overdo it. Use some restraint and find those pictures this looks best on.