Here's a minor example of what's possible working in LAB. This tends to be my prefered color space since it allows for the adjustment of lightness without affecting the saturation of color. The curve set i use for nearly all images tends to be the same! go figure. Slight variations for cast removal and/or saturation tuning. Its remarkable what can be achieved in just a few steps using LAB. Corrections that could take a professional hours or even days, take a matter of minutes with LAB. Whats even crazier is that learning how it works takes only a few seconds. Of course it took me 8 years to be brave enough to figure it out. So, hopefully a few of you who do much correction will see this and ask, how?

What's LAB and which do you think is the best of your pictures. Aditionally you may want to resize this picture. I took about three minutes to load on my machine. I realize I'm using a dial up connection and my modem is a 33.6 BUT 3 min! I think things would be better if the picture was say 1/3 as large. Bsteph

I'd be interested in a tutorial about using LAB space in PhotoShop. Or even CYMK. Usually stay in RGB, but know some pretty neat things are possible. [I am a bit confused about your examples though. The one labled "original" looks the best on my monitor. But we've talked about my monitor deficiencies many times here before... ;-) ] Welcome to the Forum BTW.

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why would you want to use those two curves ? Photoshop's standard stuff is (for me) more than sufficient to correct specific areas or specific colors or color ranges. Especially when using and storing (quick) masks, the options are endless. So, if it was meant to make the colors above more real, I don't think it's looks very good at all. Both the blue and red colors are too far off, as far as I can see :)

Same here Original image looks just fine to my eyes, but I'm no expert. The Curve One image looks too red and the Curve Two image looks too yellow (the womans skin has taken on a sickly yellow tone) and the highlights seem to bright to me in the last image. I've heard about lab space and have never worked in it, but if I did I would have to convert back to RGB in order to print my images from my Epson, no?

Exactly :) Some work in normal sRBG in photoshop would result in something like this. Still too red/yellow, but I think it's from a kodak photo cd....they're always a bit weird with colors (hard to adjust too).

???? I have no idea about lab or what anyone is talking about, i just wanted to say i like the street/character shot...even if it did take AGES to download ;-)> P.S. To me the LAB is a place I send the blood tubes after I stick a needle in someone's arm to bleed them...whoops! Sorry Jordy! :-)>

thanx for all the response! Im posting a longer explaination in a few minutes with a better example. For now, here's a more 'accurate' correction done in 30 seconds with one curve and no masks. My original intent was not to produce accurate color, but to illustrate the ability of lab to do that which rgb cannot. Mainly, to overexposed image without washing out all the color. (I dare any of you to take the original and try and produce my end result with rgb!) The red and blue colors were intentionally defeated because i felt they distracted the viewer from the primary focus... the woman. With 'accurate' color, i felt that the photo was way too busy. But that's just my opinion and we all know that there are no aesthetic absolutes! Please take a minute or two and take a look at my other pics to get an idea of what i'm after...

And thanks so much Alpha for defining lab in a way that i have to remember the next time i try and explain it. Please tell me that wasnt just 'off the top of your head!'

btw, image was scanned on a nikon 4000 with some incorrect colorsync settings. It blasted out my highlights and gave me some weird saturation issues.

This is a very good result...much better than the other.

Ahhhhh I get it. I always wondered why RGB was such a horrible system. It did not completely seem to work. I suppose cymk is better though. BUT what posessed people to think of that model! Wait a sec. So if I had a pic. with a said RGB value 12,13,14 and a darkness of say 15 then according to the model I can fkeep the RGB values tha same and just change the darkness. Fine but can't I do that in any other photo program just by adjusting the darkness. I'm not trying to poke holes I'm just trying to clarify. Seriously I would love to hear about that lab. Sounds like we will need new softwere(sp) though. Can this be applied to say psp? Oh and welcome to the forum. Bsteph

That's what I don't understand, cause to me many areas have lost tons of detail in that example. Or maybe it's cause the heavy level of compression....not sure. Sorry for being such a pain in the ass, but I just don't see what Lab would give me what I can't do in RGB.

Rork1973: LAB can give you a real boost if you are trying to correct a really poor color image. it is not fit to process the image from beginning to the end, tho. It's the same with RGB. There are operations that are not possible with RGB or lead to poor results. An example of this is removing JPEG corruptions and/or cromatic aberrations on poor-scanned images. LAB leads to perfect results. Different ways to process colors. IMHO eartho give us a wrong example of what LAB can do; to me seems he has exaggerate colors in the worked pictures... The colors in LAB profile are not ordered in a logical way, but in a mathematical one. If I need to rework the colors of a pic (which i do the 99% of the times i shot a photo with my D1x) i prefer to do such work in a scale I can comprehend immediately. This doesn't mean that LAB can't do such task... sometimes comes in handy if you need some particular correction, but simply it's too complicated for a plain color correction.

"which i do the 99% of the times i shot a photo with my D1x" Yeah, I warned you not to use a digital camera ;)

Rork: yeah... i should sell it... no...no... better give it away as a gift.... anyone interested? =P