Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual

Miscellaneous Plug-Ins

Most of the plug-ins covered in this section relate to specific tasks like enhancing detail, making enlargements, building websites, and so on, but some also alter color.

LucisArt

This plug-in has been around for many years and, while it's popular in scientific and medical circles, it's only recently begun to make a splash in the creative realm. Using a process originally developed to enhance details in images captured with electron microscopes, it brings out more detail from your image than you knew was there. Using only the luminance (lightness) info from your image, it enhances details without destroying highlights or shadows or shifting color (though you can control the color with a slider because you may want to shift the color a little).

With this plug-in, you can vary your image in thousands of ways by tweaking just a couple of sliders, and although you could possibly reproduce some of these effects with Photoshop, you'd never know these possibilities existed if you didn't use this software first. You can use this plug-in to tweak individual channels or work on the composite channel (The Channels Panel and You), and you can also blend the original back into the processed image using a slider. Figure 19-9 gives you a taste of what you can do with LucisArt. The pro version will set you back $595, but if you make your living working with images, it's money well spent; a light version that offers fewer settings and gives you limited control over mid-range ...