Processing your images in Lab color gives you some very strong and effective tools while editing your digital images. Lab Color seems to be something that isn’t talked about near enough. I haven’t used Lab color for very long but I’ve found it to be extremely powerful. Here’s a few tips I’ve picked up along the way that I thought I’d share with everyone.

Among some of the many useful tools in the Lab Color space, you can make selective color modifications or reverse the effects of color cast. Lab is a very powerful tool and I’d like to cover some of those other uses another time. For now though, we will focus on basic editing functions utilizing Lab color.

Choose a photo that you think could use a little boost and I promise you’ll be pleased with the results. In fact I’ve found images that I thought to be of good color and tone to really come to life after these easy steps. I’m going to start with this landscape image of housing nestled into the surrounding mountains. This is a stock image from CG Textures, you can find one there or use your own to follow this tutorial.

Start by changing the color mode of your images to Lab Color. (Image > Mode > Lab Color)

From here you’ll want to bring up your levels adjustment (Ctrl+L). I like to bring my sliders into the edges of my histogram then edit my mid levels to my liking. The lightness levels are purely personal preference so go with what you feel makes your image look best.

Notice if you look at the channel in your levels control that you are editing the “Lightness” channel. Instead of editing individual color ranges Lab color utilizes three different areas. As we covered you have “L” or lightness channel, next is “A” this channel represents your magenta/cyan color values, last we have “B” representing the blue/yellow color values.

Now we start on the color, switch to channel A at the top of your levels control. If you aren’t careful here you can get some really odd color shifting. To minimize this effect make sure you bring in your sliders equal amounts on the high and low side to get your baseline. It’s best to tweak color shifts after you’ve set your baseline for your A and B channels. You can do this by tweaking the middle slider for minor color shifts.

When editing my color channels I like to bring in the slider that has the least amount of room to play with. The farther you bring in your sliders the more intensity you will get from that color range. This is useful if you have certain colors in your image that seem to over power everything else. To back off that color range all you need to do is tone that channel down a bit. Look at the image above, I like to bring my slider into a nice even number. Your histogram values range from 0-255, notice my right side has been moved into 190. That means I moved in 65 from the original color setting. So just type in 65 on the other side and your color range is balanced for that channel.

Do the same for B and check the color of your image. If you have color problems such as a red shift, go back to channel A and start with your mid slider, if the color is more in the highlights or just a slight color shift this should do the trick. If it’s a deeper shift or an overall color shift you may have to tweak your high and low sliders. Just be careful not to over do it here. If you’ve color balanced your camera and your settings are correct, 9 times out of 10 you won’t have to touch the high and low sides after your initial adjustments.

That does it for the color settings of this tutorial, you can end here or follow along to give your images a little more edge. There are of course other methods for editing the color utilizing Lab but I’ll cover that at a later time.

Alright, let’s move on. After we’ve set our colors and are happy with the outcome lets move on to sharpening our images. Open your Channels palette and select the lightness channel.

This will show you the light and dark areas of your image, basically just a black and white image. Since we aren’t editing the color channels you can bump up the sharpening all you want and still not have any color artifacts that you would get with other color spaces. This is one of the big advantages of Lab Color. The more sharpening you introduce the more likely you are to get a halo effect although Lab color gives you a little more lead way before you will see this versus RGB/CMYK. Let’s start sharpening, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and play around a bit to get your desired effect. You can really bring out texture here if you get crazy with the sharpening or you can just clean up the edges a bit with a mellow sharpening pass. My tendencies are to lean towards a bit more sharpening to give images a little edge.

We’re at another good stopping point but you can still get a bit more out of this image before we’re done. Let’s adjust our curves to bring out a little more contrast. Click back on Lab in your channels palette to bring us back to our full image and allow us to move on to the curves. Notice how much you have already brought out of your image with such little effort. When you get the hang of this process it takes only a matter of seconds to get to this point.

Now bring up your curves adjustment. Make sure your back in the full image by clicking Lab in the channels palette and go to Image > Adjustments > Curves. (or Ctrl+M) To bring out a little more contrast make a slight S curve by clicking on the curve and selecting two more points as shown below. The amount of contrast is going to depend on the image but don’t be afraid to experiment here.

And that’s it, there’s no better way to edit your images and get a better look in such a short time. Once you are comfortable with this process it should take you no more then 30-45 seconds to make all of your images look amazing. So how does your image compare to the original? Here’s my final outcome, click to see a higher res image.

Lab color is the way to go when trying to give your images the edge over the competition and we’ve just scratched the surface of what it has to offer. I hope you have found this tutorial helpful, I’ll be covering other aspects of Lab color down the road.