Wednesday, April 4, 2012 –  Morning and welcome to another great day!!  Man I just learned this great technique that I’m really excited about and the shameful thing is that I could have learned this back in October of last year if I read my email *DOH*.  Anyway this technique changes the color space from RGB to LAB and back to RGB again.  It involves flattening all of your layers, changing your color space to LAB, duplicating your background layer, going to adjustments and pushing curves in equal adjustments in channels a and b (on your background copy), changing back to RGB (but not flattening your layers), and finally adjusting the opacity of the background copy layer.  It sounds like a lot of steps (and it is) but if you are familiar with actions you can create a new action that will record all of your steps which will speed up your workflow in the future.  If you are interested in trying this technique I have backed up my actions and if you email me I will send you a backup of all my custom actions.  Now with any new technique I’ve learned I have a tendency to push it way too hard.  I had my opacity slider up to 75% to begin with and had to scale it down (on this picture to about 25%) which you could barely tell.  For the purpose of this post I am going to show you a picture at 50% which is still a lot from what the original picture was.

Here is the original

and here is the LAB color space set at 50% opacity

Wow right!!  You can really see the difference but I think it’s a bit much.  If you want to read the original article you can find it here.  Anyway I hope that you all have a great day!!