what a can of worms this might be, but here goes... For the last 8 years or so, i've been working professionally in the advertising field. My primary job being electronic production with a major emphasis on color/image manipulation. I spent years and years doing all my correction in cmyk, since that was the destination space for most of my work. All the while realizing what a joke it was... hours upon hours spent trying to juggle percentage and ratio. This for an image that winds up looking like mud. As luck would have it, after returning from a year of travel, i began work at a rather large ad agency whose ONLY scanner was an absolute piece of junk (nikon coolscan or something). I realized almost immediately that with hundreds of scans to do and limited time to correct them, neither rgb nor cmyk would get me where i wanted to go. So, in a moment of desperation, i turned to my last option... just to see. Its now two years later, and i still havent shut up about the glory of lab. I promise you too shall see the light!

So for this example, i decided to take a photo that could not be viewed as being anywhere near decent color. Yes, I realize that my end result is a bit extreme and loud, as was my last post. But this was done only to illustrate the ability of lab to purify color. I rarely try and acheive acurate color these days. I feel i'm either trying to capture what i felt and remember about the scene, or i try and introduce an element of drama to an otherwise boring photograph. (Please look at my other pics for examples.) For me accurate color is WAY overrated. I dont want my final product to be as good as the original, i want it to be better. Whats the point in using all these digital tools if one doesn't really use them? And for me, lab gets me there faster and with much more interesting results than rgb EVER will.

So, my hope for all of this is merely to begin a discussion on color correction and to hopefully be able to share a bit of my knowledge and experience. thanx!