Before

After

Do you ever look back at your pictures and think to yourself: Hmmm this is a nice shot but I’m missing something, and then you realize that it doesn’t have the right color balance…
Well here is a little tutorial to maybe help you with this problem its called Lab color correction.
What is Lab color, well unlike a lot of tutorials that are around trying to explain what it is and what is does, I will try to keep it down to earth simple. Lab color is designed to approximate human vision. It’s that easy or what? Adjusting the Lab values of your picture make your picture go from hmm it’s nice to wow this is very nice, close to amazing did I take that? If you apply it in the right way it will boost up the colors and make you smile, but there is a catch. Like all (at least I think that) Photoshop filters you need to practice to get it right, tutorials around the web are useful but did you ever notice you never end up like the tutorial does? Well first of all most of the time you will use your own picture and that has different values in the colors, shadow, size etc, so practice till you get it right for your picture. In this case adjusting Lab values is dangerous, you can easily go too far and you can really mess up your shot, so my advise if you want to use this technique practice a lot, and keep in mind that 99% of the pictures have different settings.

Well I’ll stop talking now and let’s get into the Lab color correction.

After opening your picture you need to change the mode to Lab Color. In the toolbar select Image, Mode and then select Lab Color.

So now what Id did it and nothing happened… well not really, check the title of your picture and you will see that Lab/8 has been added to the title, so then you know you it’s OK.

Next it’s best to make a copy of your layer (Ctrl-j) or drag your background layer on the new layer icon, both way’s work, but you know that I’m sure.

Now it’s time for the fun part, make sure you have to copy of the background selected and then go to Image, Adjustments, Curves or keyboard shortcut Ctrl-m. The curves window will open and that’s where we will make the adjustments.

In the Channel drop down box you will find three options you can choose:
L = Lightness, use this channel if you want to lighten or darken up your image.

A = Magenta/Green Channel.

B = Blue/Yellow Channel.

In the L channel you can drag the slider in the way you want, no rocket science here.

When you’re done with the L channel select the A channel. The trick in this window is to drag both sliders the same amount. It doesn’t really matter if you start with the top slider or the bottom, in this example I’ve move the sliders in to 80 and -80.

Now that shot looks very strange and the colors don’t add up, now that magic starts, select the B channel and adjust the sliders to the same amount as you did in the A channel.

And there you are, switch on and of the preview button and you will see what I’m trying to explain, an amazing WOW factor. If your happy with what you see click OK and there you are, we are almost done.

Next thing is to use the Unsharp Mask, this will give a bit more bite to the shot. Select the channels tab (it should be next to your layers tab, if not select, window and then Channels. Click on the Lightness channel, you will notice that the picture you are working one changes to Black and White (don’t worry we will change it back soon).

With the Lightness channel selected go to Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask (also known as USM)

In the Unsharp Mask dialog adjust the following settings:
Amount: 200%

Radius: 1.0

Threshold: 10

(If you are using a large file you can adjust these settings to higher numbers)

Click on OK, in the channels panel click on Lab to turn back to you color version. Now select the layers panel again. With the back