Lucis InterplayArt by Barbara Williams

Creating the image Cat at Home and two variations

In this example I selected an image of a cat and an image of an empty room in an old historic house (I will call this image simply Room) to Lucis interplay. The detail of the fur against the brick would be interesting. There were large features, such as the windows and the cat's eyes, to provide interesting elements when interplayed. Below are the two original images.

Click on any image to view and download a high resolution version of the image.


Image 1: The image of a cat sitting on an embroidered chair.	Image 2: An image of an empty room in a historic house (Room).
The first step is to create an image in Photoshop with each image on one layer. Then duplicate each layer so you have two copies of the images to work with. Make the layers with the original images invisible so only the layers with the copies of the two images are visible. This is so you can always retrieve the original images if you need to. I had the copy of the Room image on the top layer and the copy of the cat image on the layer immediately below. I made the opacity of the layer with the copy of the Room image equal to 50%. Then I used Merge Visible in Photoshop to combine the two layers. The result is below. Click here or on the image below to view and download a high-resolution version of the merged image.

Image 3: The merged image. This image is the combination of the layer with a copy of the Room image at 50% opacity merged with a layer with a copy of the cat image. It has not been processed with Lucis yet.

Selecting the percentage opacity to use creates the It takes practice to determine how much of each image to combine. You have a whole different range of possible Lucis InterplayArt images From experience I know that small details like fur and brick will become more apparent if I am using the Enhance Detail slider in Lucis Pro 6.

Then I duplicated the layer with the merged image, selected the duplicate layer and opened Lucis Pro 6. Typically I start exploring possibilities using Split Channel mode. I check the Split Channels check box and uncheck Display Composite Image so I can examine the intensity information in each channel. Then I select the Red channel and play with that. Typically I start with moving the Enhance Detail slider until I see an image where I like the amount of detail and the interplay between the two images. Below is the intensity information in the Red Channel with the Enhance Detail slider set to 93. I can see both the cat and the house. The cat looks like it has been "painted" on the walls of the house.

Image 4: Screen shot of the Lucis Pro 6 User Interface, Split Channel mode, looking at the intensity information in the Red Channel with the Enhance Detail slider set to 93.

So as a first try I set the Enhance Detail slider to 93 for all of the channels, and then check the View Composite Image check box so I can see the full results of the Lucis Processing. The screen shot is below.

Image 5: The Lucis Pro 6 User Interface showing the merged image enhanced using Split Channel mode, with the Enhance Detail slider set to 93 for each color channel.

I felt that the color shifts were a little too extreme so I moved the Assign Original Image Color slider to 70% Processed, 30% Original. Then I changed the number of Processing Scan Lines to 50 so I would have a high quality output. The screen shot of the Lucis Pro 6 user Interface with these settings is shown below.

Image 6: The Lucis Pro 6 User Interface showing the merged image enhanced using Split Channel mode, with the Enhance Detail slider set to 93 for each color channel and the Assign Original Image Color slider set to 70% Processed, 30% Original.

Image 7: The final image called Cat at Home.

Lucis provides almost infinite possibilities. Below are two variations of Cat at Home that I created from processing the merged image (Image 3) with different Lucis settings. The settings are listed below the image.

Image 8: A variation of Cat at Home created by processing the merged image (Image 3) with Lucis Pro 6, Split Channel mode, each channel having the Smooth Detail slider set to 23 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 201. There was no color correction applied.

Image 9: A variation of Cat at Home created by processing the merged image (Image 3) with Lucis Pro 6, Split Channel mode, each channel having the Smooth Detail slider set to 1 and the Enhance Detail slider set to 45. The Assign Original Image Color slider was set to 20% Processed, 80% Original.