LAB Saturation and Sharpening Adjustments

Brian has posted a couple of really great articles on LAB Saturation that anyone who uses Photoshop should check out.  The first article was posted back in December and you can still find it here.

Saturation is one of those things that we tend to either ignore or overdo. In some color images, it’s the actual colors that account for the interesting-factor — and in those cases, saturation processing is very important.

I have the sneaking suspicion that most of us (yes, I’m at fault too) will use an RGB saturation adjustment layer (or an ACR adjustment) to boost the color saturation. This is probably OK for very small adjustments on the order of less than 5 or 10%. Once you go beyond that, you’ll start clipping the color highlights and end up losing tone details and textures.

But have no fear, there is a better way! The LAB (Lightness, A, B) color mode is quite useful for making higher quality adjustments to the saturation. I’m guessing that most will avoid LAB editing because it seems less intuitive, or because there’s no immediate need to use it. In reality, it’s no more difficult to use than the RGB color mode. So if you have an image that’s begging to be saturated, try out this technique and I’m certain you’ll find just how powerful it can be. (via EpicEdits)

His follow-up article on LAB Sharpening adjustments was posted this month and can be found here.

It seems that there are many ways to sharpen a photo, and the most common is Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask. It’s a fine tool for most cases, but it can produce terrible results when used incorrectly or without caution. I, myself, usually fall back on the Unsharp mask for a majority of my sharpening needs. But using this tool in the RGB color space is not ideal!

Recently I posted an article about a LAB Saturation Photoshop Technique — and this article is much the same, but with a focus on Sharpening. LAB (Lightness, A, B) color mode is a great way to increase the quality of a tool such as the Unsharp Mask or other sharpening methods. (via EpicEdits)

He provides the Photoshop actions and everything so go read the articles and check out the neat way he does the rollover to see the changes made after he uses the action. I wish I could learn how to do that.