The Lucisart plugin has been quite popular and still emerges daily on photos pushing the hdr-effect look beyond its boundaries.It’s a very handy plugin in order to recover detail from your images.
When applying this filter to selections or separate layers, the white-background-syndrome appears, leaving you with a mess to clean, so here is a way around it allowing you to work with this filter on selections with more comfort.Tip came in from SweetBeat
Ok so let’s say we only want to apply the lucisart plugin/filter to the water below this ship, leaving the sky etc out of the manipulation.
So, select the water with the selection tools and feather ( Edit —> feather ) that selection in order to have smooth edge transition.
Now we make a new layer from this selection ( layer –> new –> layer via copy or simply control+J )
If we apply the filter now to this selection/layer we encounter this problem, the white-snowman-syndrome :
As you can see the water has gotten richer details, but an avalanche has set in.Here’s a way around it.
BEFORE applying the Lucisart filter, add a LAYER MASK to your selection ( Layer —> layer mask —> reveal all – or go to the ‘add layer mask icon in the layers palette below )
After adding such Layer Mask it remains selected ( check the white border on the mask ).You don’t want that, so, select the layer again now it has a mask.
NOW it is time to load the selection/layer and apply the filter !
As you can see the problem is gone.Now you can apply this filter at ease on parts of the image / separate layers.
Here is the photo without and with the filter applied to the water :
