Photoshop LAB Color

Dan Margulis wrote a book on Photoshop LAB colour and the Canyon conundrum. Margulis calls LAB the most powerful colour space and explains why you should use it to enhance and correct photographs, and not only those that have a canyon as their subject.

Margulis starts his book with the general observation that most photographers will use LAB only for canyon alike photos, while it can be used for a lot more. He says LAB enhancement is very powerful but often misunderstood. That's the basis of his book.

Then he explains how Photoshop deals with LAB and which type of photos it is useful to apply it to. According to Margulis, one of the types of photos that you might put LAB to goo use with are portraits. The book further explains how to sharpen in the Luminance channel and blur in the AB channels, and which dangers lie ahead when you're using LAB to correct images.

Margulis will also deal with setting up a workflow in LAB, retouching old photos in LAB and replacing colours in that colour space.

The book is well written, not without some dry humour which makes this topic all the more digestible. The explanations are clear and concise, and the images carefully selected on their educational value. The CD-rom that comes with the book includes the images used by the author. The book is conceived to be a semi-tutorial, semi-reference work. There are some exercises in there that you can take to see if you've understood Margulis' explanations in full. But even without taking these, you should find it easy to apply his knowledge yourself by simply following with Photoshop and the included photos.

As the topic itself is reason for some well-deserved "ooh"s and "aaah"s, I think it's hard to go wrong with this book. Applying Margulis' knowledge to your own photos can only make them look better.

Real World Color Management 2nd Edition

Real World Color Management by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting is a standard work. It should be in the library of every desktop publisher, photographer and graphic designer.

Real World Color Management 2nd Edition has grown --in volume and depth. The book now covers theory more elaborate, explaining how colour influences digital work better. There's also a better explanation of how ICC colour profiles work, and why you need them.

The authors have taken care to provide the reader with more examples, and more imagery throughout the book. This makes it a lot easier to understand what's being said. The book also spends more attention to editing and checking existing ICC profiles with a number of software programs.

There's one thing that I found disturbing in this otherwise must-have book. The authors cover a GretagMacbeth tool called ColorLab. The version discussed in the book is not the most recent one, and many of the menu selections and commands are downright wrong. Luckily for the readers, there is a companion site.