One of my favorite books. The first time I opened Photoshop, I was overwhelmed. I thought to myself, how could anyone use this application effectively? There is so much to take in. Well, like a lot of things in life, a lot of practice breeds familiarity. One of the things I quickly struggled with was color management. What about color balance? How do you adjust color saturation so that things don't turn a wacky unnatural color? How can you get colors that resemble those beautiful slides you got back when shooting with Fujichrome Velvia? I may not have answered all these questions, but I did run across a book that changed the way I color corrected my images. This book is called Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace by Dan Margulis.

This book's premise is that you can color correct your images in the LAB color space with unbelievable natural results. It goes on to say that this method will not work for every image. Some images that are already highly saturated could be pushed to the limit with this process. In essence, you have a Light channel, an A channel (comprised of Red and Green), and a B Channel (comprised of Blue and Yellow). You basically adjust curves to produce color saturation, decrease color saturation, adjust contrast, adjust luminosity, or adjust color hues. Additionally, the book covers topics such as sharpening in the L channel, performing noise reduction, and performing color balance on images.

Again, I don't pretend to be a Photoshop wizard - I'm not. However, I did find some principals in this book that proved to be invaluable to me. Mainly, how to produce very nice color saturation with natural results with very simple curve adjustments. I highly recommend this book to anyone that is seeking alternate ways to perform color enhancements in his or her images post processing.