Sometimes it’s really frustrating. You try so hard to adjust the levels of your photo with Photoshop but it seems to be impossible to get a satisfying result. Most of the time the reason for this is the RGB color mode, which does not fit the color scheme of your picture. So in this tutorial I will show you how you can get rid of this problem by switching the color mode to LAB. This is my original example image:
This image could really need some more contrast and more vivid colors. Usually, the easiest and fastest way to fix that is hitting the button to auto-adjust the levels (Ctrl+L -> Auto) but this time the result is an image where the original blue colors are lost:
In order to keep the original hue you have to convert the image to LAB colors. If you haven’t done so already, go back one step in the history (Ctrl+Z), then click on Image > Mode > LAB color as seen on the picture below:
Now try auto-adjusting the levels again (Ctrl+L -> Auto). This time you should be able to increase the contrast while preserving the natural blue colors of the image like this:
So, whenever the level adjustments are not satisfactory in RGB mode just switch over to LAB colors and try again. In most cases you should get a much better result.
TIP: LAB mode is great for touching up the levels of portrait photos because skin colors will look much more natural 
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Aren’t tutorials meant to tell you how to do everything??? HOW do you adjust the colours? WHAT do you adjust the colours to? If we were smart with the program we wouldn’t need tutorials
if you read IT!! they tell you to auto adjust the levels YES?? but instead of doing this in rgb mode do it by converting to LAB mode first. Hope this points it out more clearly
Definitely a good tutorial. Yeah there isn’t much to it, but besides that it is probably one point, it’s also saying if try A doesn’t work, here’s a try B. Along with that, now knowing this is good for a way to check to see which works better, RGB or Lab.
Great tutorial.
Great tutorial! Thanks!
RGB stands 4 red green blue, wut about Lab? does it stand for sumthing? wuld u reccomend lab since web color is rgb?
This was a big help in fixing my photos up. I don’t see how I over looked LAB colors for years, thanks.
LAB Stand for:
L: Lighness
A:Blue & Red
B:Green & Yellow
Hope this can help u
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