Lucis InterplayArt by Barbara Williams

Creating the image Shimmer and two variations

This is an interplay of one image of some rippling water with three flipped versions of itself. The original images is shown below, Image 1. The first flipped image is Image 2. Image 3 is the 50%-50% combination of Images 1 and 2 using layers and opacity and merge layers in Photoshop. To create this I placed one image is on one layer and set the opacity to 50%. The second image is on the layer below with the opacity set to 100%. Then the two layers are merged.

Click on any image in this tutorial to view and download a high resolution copy of the image except for the screen shots.


Image 1: The original water image.	Image 2: The water image flipped the first way.	Image 3: First merged image, 50% Image 1 and 50% Image 2.
Next I created a merged 50%-50% image from the other two flipped versions of the original image. The two flipped images are Images 4 and 5 and the 50%-50% merged image is shown in Image 6.

Image 4: The water image flipped the second way.	Image 5: The water image flipped the third way.	Image 6: The second merged image, 50% Image 4 and 50% Image 5.
Next I merged Image 3 and Image 6 50%-50%. This image is shown below.

Image 7: The merged image that will be processed with Lucis. It is an even combination of the original image and the image flipped three ways.
I copied the above image to a new layer, sleeted that layer, and opened Lucis Pro 6 was opened. I checked the Split Channels check box to enter Split Channel Mode. Right away the image has increased detail and shifted colors. This is because each color channel has much less than 257 contrast levels. They have 141 to 141 contrast levels. Part of the Lucis processing is to stretch the image contrasts to 257 contrast levels which increases image detail and shift the colors.

Image 8: Lucis User Interface, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box checked, sliders unmoved.
I unchecked the Display Composite check box so I could select and alter the contrast information in each color channel. In the image below the Red channel is selected and the sliders have not been altered.

Image 9: Lucis User Interface, Red channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, sliders unmoved.
I moved the Enhance Detail slider until I had an image with a level of detail I wanted. In the image below the Red channel is selected, the Smooth Detail slider is set to 1 and the Enhance Detail slider is set to 75.

Image 10: Lucis User Interface, Red channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, Enhance Detail slider set to 75.
In the next two images I show the Lucis User Interface with the Green and Blue channels selected with the Enhance Detail slider set to 75. You can see that the image is different for each channel even though the Enhance Detail slider is the same for each channel.

Image 11: Lucis User Interface, Green channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, Enhance Detail slider set to 75.

Image 12: Lucis User Interface, Blue channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, Enhance Detail slider set to 75.
Now comes the fun part. I checked the Display Composite Image check box to see what I had. From there I could adjust the sliders, mix in part of the original image or use the Assign Original Image slider to remove all or a part of the color shifts. However in this case I left the image alone.

Image 13: Lucis User Interface, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box checked, Enhance Detail slider set to 75 for each channel.
The final processed image is below.

Image 14: The final image, *Shimmer*.
If the individual channels were processed differently then of course very different results. I have played with Lucis for hundreds if not thousands of hours, so I can tell almost intuitively how I need to process the channels to get a certain effect. Below I am showing the Lucis User Interface for each color channel again with very different Lucis slider settings and at the end I will show the processed image, which is the first variation of Shimmer.

Image 15: Lucis User Interface, Red channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, the Smooth Detail slider set to 3 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 9. This is an extremely patterned image so the final result will have a lot of red in it.

Image 16: Lucis User Interface, Green channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, the Smooth Detail slider set to 47 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 53. This will add a lot of green patches to the final image.

Image 16: Lucis User Interface, Blue channel selected, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box unchecked, the Smooth Detail slider set to 53 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 59. This will add a lot of blue patches to the final image.

Image 17: Lucis User Interface, Split Channel Mode, Display Composite Image check box checked, the Smooth Detail slider set to 3 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 9 for the Red channel, the Smooth Detail slider set to 47 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 53 for the Green channel, and the Smooth Detail slider set to 53 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 59. for the Blue Channel.
I did not like these colors but I liked the detail and contrasts. I moved the Assign Original Image Color slider to 0%Processed/100% Original to remove all of the color shifts. The Lucis-processed image is below.

Image 18: Shimmer, variation 2.
I liked both images and decided to play with combining them. Below is the third variation of Shimmer, created by merging a layer with *Shimmer variation 2* set to 35% opacity plus a layer with Shimmer at 35% opacity plus a layer with the original image at 100% opacity. By adding in the original image I toned down the color shifts and made the image less symmetrical.

Image 19: Shimmer, variation 3.