I recently purchased a book that delves into color correction in the LAB colorspace (If the time of my post is any indication, It’s definitely something that’s go me excited). I decided to try some of what I learned to the test, so I pulled this photo from my archives:

It’s a picture of the mountains in Sedona, AZ that I took around 2005. All I did here was balance the levels and save for Web at 85%. I have a habit of taking a ton of photos (which any good photographer knows to do), but in my book, this was a dud–it just didn’t capture the saturated color of what I saw in person, and the composition is nothing amazing. Hence, I never bothered to clean it up.

For the sake of this exercise, though, I figured, “what if I did try to clean it up?” So, in RGB, I cranked up the saturation by 50%, and then created some contrast by doing a levels S curve.

Here’s the LAB version:

So, the difference? The LAB version took less than half the time to tool with. I simply created more drastic angles in A and B, and then gave it a bit of an S curve in the lightness. To top it off, I did an unsharpen mask (I unsharpened only the lightness channel in the LAB version).

I tend to like the LAB version a bit more, as I think the trees in the RGB version create some unnatural colors. I’ve read that the saturation tool in Photoshop tends to lighten images along with saturating them. Not only that, but the saturation tool creates much more artifacting, as seen here:

(RGB is left, LAB is right)

All in all, I feel like a kid in a candy store, and I’ve just gotten started. Learning this now is kinda bittersweet, though, as it makes me wonder how many photos of mine I’ve destroyed in the past simply because I didn’t know the best way to color correct them (thank goodness for RAW!).

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 4:23 am and is filed under photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.