Emily Haine July 30, 2017 Share July 30, 2017 Hello everyone. Can I ask if you see any benefits of working in LAB color space? EM Link to comment Share on other sites
Orash Rahnema July 31, 2017 Share July 31, 2017 Hi Emily, I use it quite a lot in resolve to add saturation, sometimes add color tint and to add sharpness only in the luma channel. I saw a Peter Doyle interview where he was saying that he used it to control the deep blue dress in the tim burton movie. I wish I knew exactely what he did and I wish I would learn more way to use the lab color space. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites
David Goldsmith August 3, 2017 Share August 3, 2017 (edited) The book "Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace" is well worth a read to get into using Lab. It's aimed at photoshop but that doesn't get in the way. https://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-LAB-Color-Adventures-Colorspace/ I use Lab a lot for sharpening, denoising, colour contrast and find it extremely useful when working with poorly exposed drone footage. The Basegrade operator in Baselight is based on a proprietary variant of Lab tweaked to suit white balancing and HDR/Wide gamut. In Resolve it's easy to have a play with the curves in Lab mode, you can also use it along with printer points to act like exposure/tint/white balance. If you like working with LGG it's a little more fiddly but you can set a node in Lab to just the first channel to adjust contrast and another node to the second 2 to have a grading experience a little like Rank. Edited August 3, 2017 by David Goldsmith 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites
Abby Bader August 3, 2017 Share August 3, 2017 Welcome @David Goldsmith, great to see you here! Link to comment Share on other sites
Emily Haine November 20, 2017 Author Share November 20, 2017 Can't wait to give it a go, thank you so much for the detailed answers. Link to comment Share on other sites
cameronrad November 21, 2017 Share November 21, 2017 Just want to mention that hardly anyone in stills actually uses LAB mode. A lot of the techniques proposed by Dan in his book we're later proven to be wrong or misinformed. In stills we typically will leverage LAB mode math in the form of blend modes, but you hardly see anyone actually working within LAB mode. Usually retouchers go through a cycle of experimenting with it hoping to find secrets or techniques not accomplishable with other modes, however end up back using Trichromatic Color Models like RGB vs. opponent color models like LAB as a working space. LAB is great when it's used for the underlying mathematics for color transformations or blend modes. For instance, luminosity and color blend mode in Photoshop. A lot of the earlier LAB mode techniques in photoshop were proposed before those blend modes became available. One big thing I hear is ability to control luminance independent of color. Which is no different than using luminosity blend mode. Another is being able to stretch color channels (saturation) without effecting luminance. Which is like color or saturation blend mode, however you're not as constrained with boundaries of rgb gamut though you may clip colors. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites
