Lucida is free forever for personal use. Upgrade to Pro when you need higher performance, larger canvases, and extras that speed up your workflow. Below is a friendly comparison - no jargon, just what you'll notice while creating.
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The media library contains enhanced scans of classic Bargue Plates, reproduced at high resolution and cleaned for digital use. Bargue Plates are a 19th century set of academic drawing studies originally created by Charles Bargue and Jean-Louis Gérôme. Students used them to train their eye by copying the tonal values and forms, a fundamental exercise in traditional art education. Practicing on these plates helps you learn proportion, shading and observation without needing the original prints.
•Settings persistence
With settings persistence, your adjustments are automatically saved and restored across sessions. This includes your grid configuration, brightness, contrast, blur, and posterize settings — so you never have to dial in your preferred setup from scratch each time you open the app.
•Source auto-reload
Lucida remembers the last video stream or image URL you were working with and reconnects to it automatically when you reopen the app. Whether you regularly shoot from a fixed camera angle or return to the same reference image, you can resume instantly without hunting through menus or re-entering URLs. Combined with settings persistence, the entire session is restored exactly as you left it.
•Image synchronization
When working in overlay or side-by-side mode, zooming or panning one image can quickly throw it out of alignment with the other. Image synchronization locks both images together — zoom in on your canvas and the reference zooms to match; pan to a corner and both images move as one. The alignment you set up is preserved no matter how much you zoom or move around. Rotation and flip are also synced, with automatic correction so both images always appear to move in the same direction. When the color picker is also active, tapping to sample a color in one pane automatically samples the corresponding point in the other — so you compare matching areas with a single tap.
•Strobe animation
Strobe pulses the top layer's opacity in overlay mode on a smooth cosine cycle. At each peak the layer is fully visible at its set opacity; at each trough it fades to invisible. The effect makes proportion and alignment errors jump out — your eye catches discrepancies far more easily when the two images alternate than when they sit side by side. Speed is adjustable from 0.1 Hz (once every five seconds) to 2 Hz (four times per second). Strobe is available in overlay mode only and requires a Pro license.
•Timelapse recording
Timelapse Recording captures your painting session as a compressed video without any external software. While a live camera feed is running, the app collects still frames in the background at automatic intervals and encodes them into a video file when you are ready to export. You choose the output duration (5 s to 1 min) before starting — that is the length of the finished video, regardless of how long your session runs. Sessions of any length are supported: if you paint for many hours, the buffer adapts automatically by spacing frames further apart so nothing is lost. Both the reference and artwork panes can record independently. Export produces an MP4 file (WebM fallback) downloaded directly from the browser — no upload required. The resulting clip is ready to share on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.
•Max video frequency
The maximal frame rate for video rendering is limited to maintain smooth performance. The free version allows up to 60 frames per second (fps), which is sufficient for most reference and tracing work. Upgrading to Pro doubles this limit to 120 fps, providing even smoother and more responsive video when recording or replaying fast movements. However, the actual performance may vary based on your device's hardware capabilities and the complexity of the scene.
* Some browsers or devices may have their own limitations on video processing speed.
•Max image resolution
The maximum resolution for input images is capped to ensure the app runs smoothly on a wide range of devices. The free version supports images up to 3840 pixels (4K), which is suitable for most reference photos and artwork. Upgrading to Pro increases this limit to 7680 pixels (8K), allowing you to work with ultra-high-resolution images for even more detailed references and larger canvases. Keep in mind that working with higher resolution images may require more powerful hardware for optimal performance.
•Brightness control
The brightness adjustment allows you to make your reference images lighter or darker to better see values and details. In the free version, the brightness slider is limited to a range of 50% to 150%, which provides basic control for all lighting conditions. Upgrading to Pro unlocks the full range from 0% (completely dark) to 200% (very bright), giving you the flexibility to match even the most challenging lighting scenarios and enhance visibility of subtle details in your references.
•Contrast control
The contrast adjustment lets you increase or decrease the difference between light and dark areas in your reference images. The free version offers a limited contrast range of 50% to 150%, which can help improve visibility in many cases. Upgrading to Pro expands this range to 0% (completely flat) to 200% (extremely high contrast), allowing you to fine-tune the contrast to your liking and better analyze the values and shapes in your references, especially in scenes with tricky lighting or low contrast.
•Blur effect
The blur effect helps you soften distractions in your reference images, making it easier to focus on the overall shapes and values. In the free version, you can apply a blur of up to 10 pixels, which is sufficient for basic softening. Upgrading to Pro increases this limit to 15 pixels, allowing for a stronger blur effect that can be particularly useful when working with busy or detailed references where you want to simplify the image and concentrate on the main forms and values.
•Posterize bands
The posterize effect reduces the number of tonal levels in your reference images, creating distinct bands of value that can help you better understand the underlying structure. In the free version, you can choose between 2 to 6 tonal levels, which is great for basic value studies. Upgrading to Pro doubles this range to 2 to 12 tonal levels, giving you more flexibility to find the right balance between simplification and detail in your references, especially when working with complex lighting or subtle value changes.
•Posterize smoothness
The posterize smoothness setting controls how harsh or smooth the transitions are between the tonal bands created by the posterize effect. In the free version, you can adjust this setting up to a value of 5, which provides a moderate level of smoothing. Upgrading to Pro allows you to increase this limit to 10, enabling much smoother tonal shapes. This can be particularly beneficial when working with complex references having too much details.
•Posterize by color
In addition to the standard value-based posterization, Lucida can analyze an image using color clustering — extracting the most representative colors in the scene and mapping every pixel to its nearest match. The result looks like a screen-printed or color-separated version of the image, making it easy to see how many distinct color families the subject actually contains and where each one sits.
Basic supports up to 12 color clusters. Pro raises this to 32, which is enough to capture subtle palette relationships in complex subjects like portraits or textured fabrics.
The extracted palette is shown as a row of editable color swatches. Click any swatch to override it with a custom color — useful for mapping the detected palette to the actual paint colors on your palette. In Pro, all posterization settings including any color overrides are saved automatically and restored the next time you open the app. In Basic, overrides reset when you close the app.
•Limited palette simulation
Palette simulation answers a question every painter with a limited palette faces: "If I could only use these pigments, what would this scene actually look like?" It remaps every pixel of your reference image to the closest color achievable by mixing the pigments on your palette, using the same physics that governs real paint mixing.
The result is a version of your reference painted entirely in your own colors — before you pick up a brush. Hues that your palette can reach are shown accurately; hues outside your gamut shift toward the nearest achievable mixture, revealing exactly where you will need to simplify or substitute.
Lucida ships with built-in palettes — the Zorn Palette (4 colors), a Primary triad (5 colors), and a general-purpose Default (9 colors). You can also build your own by picking from a library of ~109 traditional artist pigments, entering any custom hex color, or saving and renaming up to 10 personal palettes.
Up to 16 pigments per palette are supported. The simulation runs as a GPU shader (WebGL2) and is effectively instant on modern hardware, even on live video.