Color mixing with LAB mode in Photoshop

Many digital painter who uses photoshop knows that yellow mixed with blue don’t give green, because when you average two colors in RGB mode the result color will lose luminosity. However recently I read about LAB color mode, this is pretty well know dark magic among retouchers who use photoshop. LAB mode work totally different when mixing colors!

The image above on the left is a blending using RGB mode, its bad, and ugly. On the right is a same colors mixed when the document got converted to LAB mode, the mixed color doe not lose luminosity or saturation. the LAB numbers for the RGB version is (L:52, a:-10, b: 56) and LAB version on the right is(L:71, a:1, b: 73), so the LAB version has 20 point more brightness, appears warmer and lots of yellow in it, if i’m not mistaken this yellow(b:73) is considered imaginary color, color that couldn’t exsit but can be expressed in LAB.

Now back to digital painters, I wonder how many knows about LAB, my guess is not many. Most painter will always have at least 4 colors to mix when blending two color to fill in the bad blending, so they would never directly blend two colors but use something they like in between. Now maybe painting in LAB could be something interesting…
Here more funky color blending notes from Joseph Francis, who initially got me interested in this.

~ by yinako on October 29, 2006.