Dan Margulis’ Photoshop LAB Color

Dan Margulis’ new book focuses on Photoshop’s nuclear color space. But who is it written for—the novice or the expert?

A few weeks ago I wrote a very favorable review for Ben Willmore’e Up To Speed: Photoshop CS2, and one thing I really liked about the book was its specialized focus and in-depth coverage. Too many Photoshop books cover every teensy-weensy feature of the application and each with only a passing comment or paragraph. Now Dan Margulis, whose “Professional Photoshop” book has been the bible of color-correction for many years, has put out “Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace”. It sounds like a doctoral dissertation, but it’s actually a substantial book devoted to a single obscure menu item that almost no one understands or even pronounces correctly. However, as Dan spends much of the book trying to prove, LAB is a valuable “nuclear option” for the arsenal of any Photoshop professional.

LAB: A Primer

You’ll find “Lab Color” in the Image->Mode menu. Don’t let Photoshop’s mixed-case “Lab” fool you: according to Dan’s book, it should be in all caps and pronounced as letters, like CMYK or RGB. LAB is a color space that is unique in Photoshop in that the L channel carries all contrast and value information, while the A and B channels compose the color (A controls green and magenta, B controls blue and yellow). The LAB gamut is much, much larger than CMYK or RGB and can create colors not possible in our universe. But, as Dan’s book teaches us again and again, in retouching it’s sometimes these unreal colors that end up achieving the best final results (and, as “Professional Photoshop” readers will attest, Dan Margulis is nothing if not insistent on creating the very best images). LAB is the best color space for retouching (Chapter 11 of the LAB book is simply titled “The Best Retouching Space”) because of its ability to separate detail from color and make weak color into vibrant color.

A book written for both the novice and expert

Dan made it clear to members of the Applied_Color_Theory user group that a major challenge with “Photoshop LAB Color” was in writing a book so novice users could grasp the basics of LAB, while expert users would out of the same book gain bleeding-edge knowledge and techniques that make normal users feel like they’re in fourth-year astrophysics. LAB is such a foreign and advanced topic that it presents its own conundrum: cover just the basics, and you bore the advanced users; cover every detail and point of theory, and you confuse the novice users. Dan’s solution was to split each chapter into two sections, each one with its own typeface and approach. The first half of every chapter is a gentle walkthrough of LAB techniques and some explanation of how LAB can be used in real-world situations, and the half ends with a short review and exercises. Then the second half begins, and “Professional Photoshop” veterans will probably say this is where “Photoshop LAB Color” starts to feel like a Dan Margulis book, with exposition on color theory and color theory history, lots of color numbers and image-by-image comparisons that seek to create a LAB expert in each of us.

Dan has been writing long enough to make both sections work well, though inevitably I think everyone who reads this book will gravitate to the sections they understand and perhaps see the other sections as something of a waste. I enjoyed the advanced sections but only skimmed the novice sections. And there will be other readers who are intrigued by the novice sections but end up discouraged and confused by the expert sections. This book could almost have been split into two publications, one for beginners and one for experts.

The design: Jam-packed

This book is full of large images, large type with large x-heights and large columns. Dan even modified the typeface, as he does in some of his other publications, in order to increase the type size; read the last pages of his books to learn just how he modifies the typefaces he uses. But with all those elements of largesse, I find these and other Dan Margulis books to be tough to read. White space is nowhere. Big blocks of text and images are everywhere. I know Dan believes in large images and type, and I agree with him and especially with the large images part, because it’s so important to see what exactly is going on in those examples. But the book is so packed with images and text that it can be overwhelming and difficult to read, not because the material is tough to grasp but because it takes a concentrated effort just to slog through the design of it all!

Dan has publicly grappled with publishers before over the design-versus-size issue. Photoshop User magazine, the official publication of NAPP, runs his Makeready columns but, according to one of Dan’s posts on the Applied Color Theory group, “insists on running excessive white space and declines to accommodate the larger images I prefer to use.” For that reason Dan considers Electronic Publishing, which also runs that column, to be the official source of Makeready. Maybe Photoshop User is on to something in regards to design. From this designer’s standpoint, the layouts could use some fresh air.

Magic color

Despite questions about the layout and the organization of the book, I think “Photoshop LAB Color” is a great Photoshop book and essential for anyone who does color-correction. “Professional Photoshop” gives substantial space to LAB, and Dan has seminars at Photoshop World and others that focus solely on LAB, but this is the only book devoted to LAB that I know of and it’s quite exhaustive. Dan himself said that some of the techniques in these pages were developed and studied in the course of writing this book, which means they are new tricks that we are the first to employ. Some techniques that I got the most out of were:

• Building masks with LAB
• Eliminating moire
• Changing or matching product colors
• Blending the A or B channel into L to modify colors without selecting
• Improving portraits and fleshtones, covered in detail in the last chapter

There’s plenty more, but these were the ones that I was drawn to the most. They are real-world techniques a Photoshop user will go to again and again. And despite the split in chapters between hand-holding for the novices and rocket science for the experts, there is more than enough good writing and examples to teach anyone how to harness the power of LAB. This is a book for experts and novices alike, and everyone will benefit.

Conclusion

There were doubts before the publication of “Photoshop LAB Color” that it would be successful: the thinking was that the subject matter was too narrow, too specialized, and/or too advanced to write a book that would sell well. Thanks to positive feedback from the Applied Color Theory group, Dan did indeed write the book and both he and his publisher were surprised when word came a few days after the unofficial release date that it had already taken the top spot on Amazon.com’s bestsellers list for computer and Internet books (the official publication date wasn’t until Photoshop World, a few days later). I’m not surprised by the book’s success: the Photoshop book market is starved for well-written books for the advanced user, focusing on specialized topics. For Photoshop users who have already learned much of what the application can do, finding a book like “Photoshop LAB Color” is like finding an oasis in the usual bookstore Sahara. The water may not be crystal-clear, but it is good to drink.