Bifurcator wrote:
Yup! Levitation and blackmagic; Lab!
There is a very simple method of increasing color separation using Lab mode that is especially useful if you are using a camera/lens combination that doesn\'t shine in the colors department. The problem with saturation adjustments in RGB mode is that colors and luminosity are tied together while LAB mode separates them. Furthermore Lab expresses colors in terms of balance between pairs (green/magenta, blue/yellow) rather than actual RGB color values.
This means that by simply increasing the contrast in the a & b channels you drive colors apart.
The practical part is simple enough. You go to Lab mode, add an curves adjustment layer and increase the contrast in the a & b channels:
Make sure the line crosses the origin or you\'ll get a color cast. You can then adjust the intensity of the effect with the opacity of the adjustment layer.
The effect? Here are two examples of an RGB saturation increase and the Lab method described above. I\'ve pushed both over the top to illustrate the difference. Open the images in separate tabs in the browser and flip between them.
As you can see saturation and contrast are inevitably tied in RGB space while in Lab mode you can deal with them separately - i.e increase or decrease the contrast in the image without affecting the colors.
May 11, 2011 at 09:14 PM
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