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!

Hey expert, welcome to the forum! =) I'd love to hear more about this all too.....incredibly interesting stuff!

thats a great question, where to start...
how about where i started !

image/mode/lab
image/adjust/curves

beyond that , i'm not too sure. Like i said on that previous post, my curve tends to be the same each time with some minor variations. There's just this one little trick that you have to use in order to get the curves to really work tho. Shall i share? or maybe i should wait and see if anyone can figure it out... 'specially you Alpha... ;)

lol, well we all know it won't be me! (But I am willing to learn...) Welcome Eartho! I await more illumination... :-)>

Hi & welcome to the forum, I'm always ready to learn & this looks interesting....

Tell me more about lab, eartho. Is this some software that
you have written? A plug-in for Photoshop? Will you release
the source code (for us Linux/Gimp users) to port?

Here's a quick test using Gimp's "Curves" and "Color Balance" plugins. This was done on a left-hand-side crop of your example image from above. Only took a minute or two.

This test image isn't as saturated as yours and the blues
were harder to control (notice the sky and the blue tiles
under the eaves of the building for example). But aside
from that, what's the advantage of lab?

How about this Asalina I have many many picts which are way underexposed and awaiting for a wonderful help such as this. Bsteph

...now... this is my vision of the problem... the original photography is in some way too corrupted and too little to do a good work... i've retouched it anyway.... I've used the LAB profile and RGB as well... seems a better result to me... a proof that you can't work only with a single tool to do good jobs... You need some layers and masks also.. and 10 minutes of work...

ummm, ok. Artax, did you mean the original scan is corrupted or the slide? And the results seems better? To be honest, your correction seems to be without life. The poor old building has seen better days, i know, but it looks like the color vampires have come along and just sucked all the life out of her. Remember, my original correction was done to illustrate an example, not to prove my correction skills. Glad this is challenging a few you of you tho! More to come....

i'm not involving the correction skill of no one... just working on a poor image. I'm talking about the original or "start" image you uploaded. It's not a correction contest (or it is?)... BTW... my correction try to catch in the most natural way (i was not here i cannot say wich color the thing really is) the innate colors of the building. Realism... and sometimes this means low-color... anyway if your original has poor color informations you can't just add 'em... maybe wrong image for an example.