Dan Margulis wrote a book on Photoshop LAB colour and the Canyon conundrum. Margulis calls LAB the most powerful colour space and explains why you should use it to enhance and correct photographs, and not only those that have a canyon as their subject.

Margulis starts his book with the general observation that most photographers will use LAB only for canyon alike photos, while it can be used for a lot more. He says LAB enhancement is very powerful but often misunderstood. That’s the basis of his book.

Then he explains how Photoshop deals with LAB and which type of photos it is useful to apply it to. According to Margulis, one of the types of photos that you might put LAB to goo use with are portraits. The book further explains how to sharpen in the Luminance channel and blur in the AB channels, and which dangers lie ahead when you’re using LAB to correct images.

Margulis will also deal with setting up a workflow in LAB, retouching old photos in LAB and replacing colours in that colour space.

The book is well written, not without some dry humour which makes this topic all the more digestible. The explanations are clear and concise, and the images carefully selected on their educational value. The CD-rom that comes with the book includes the images used by the author.

The book is conceived to be a semi-tutorial, semi-reference work. There are some exercises in there that you can take to see if you’ve understood Margulis’ explanations in full. But even without taking these, you should find it easy to apply his knowledge yourself by simply following with Photoshop and the included photos.

As the topic itself is reason for some well-deserved “ooh"s and “aaah"s, I think it’s hard to go wrong with this book. Applying Margulis’ knowledge to your own photos can only make them look better.