Hey, this is Austin Kimler with the fourth Phase 2 Teachback on using Photoshop.Today is going to be a quick look on useing the LAB color mode to boost color out of your photos. Im not sure where I picked up this trick as I’ve known it for quite awhile, but it seems to give your photos that extra saturation without looking overly saturated. This technique was used before CS4 so you might be able to get some results close to this by just using the vibrance adjustment layer. Im sure not a lot of people ever go into LAB color mode so I thought I would just give a quick little tip with it.

First off most the color modes are named after the channels that are in them… so rgb is red green blue… and LAB stands for Lightness, A, and B. LAB is based on the human perception of color. The numeric values in Lab describe all the colors that a person with normal vision sees. Because Lab describes how a color looks rather than how much of a particular colorant is needed for a device such as a monitor, camera, or printer to produce colors, Lab is considered to be a device-independent color model. Color management systems use Lab as a color reference to transform a color from one color space to another color space. The A channel represents the green-red axis while the B channel represents the blue-yellow axis.

Topics Covered:
LAB Color Mode over view
Curves panel

One thing I forgot to mention in the tutorial… Don’t forget to switch back to RGB color mode when you are done. You can do this by going to Image> Mode> RGB.

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