Pioneer Spirit

I expect that you may have been won­dering what I’ve been up to, over the last few weeks…

Well, the truth is that now that the exhib­i­tions have been taken down I have got a little more time for one of the aspects of my job that I enjoy the most—learning!

I am pre­dom­in­antly a visual learner, and as such, I have found the explo­sion of online training on the internet over these past few years, incred­ibly helpful. If you have kept any sort of an eye on this field, then it seems as though there are new training pro­viders coming online con­stantly. So, how do you know what to watch?

For the past 5 years, I have sub­scribed to the Lynda.com online training lib­rary (amongst many other pro­viders). They have always pro­duced great con­tent, and some of their instructors are the very best in their respective fields. One of my favourite instructors is Deke McCle­l­land. Why? Ima­gine Eddie Izzard teaching you Pho­toshop. Got it? Well, he’s like that! Deke is also the most thor­ough tutor that I have ever seen. Inter­ested in learning about making selec­tions with Pho­toshop? Deke recorded a 33 hour training series that might help! Actions and auto­ma­tion more your thing? Set aside 18 hours—you will have it coming out of your eyeballs…

So, I am trying to catch up on some training videos now that term has wound down, and this week Deke has released a new training series cov­ering the Lab Color mode within Pho­toshop. You should have seen my face!

Lab (or CIE L*a*b* D50 to be geeky) is one of the more obscure fea­tures within Pho­toshop. You could spend years using the applic­a­tion and never use it. If you have ever selected it, out of curi­osity, then you might have been hard–pressed to explain what it did, unless you did a bit of dig­ging around. You see, Lab is a colour space, i.e., a mech­anism through which Pho­toshop can numer­ic­ally describe the col­ours present in your doc­u­ment. Sounds cool huh? No? How about if I told you that you can use Lab to create col­ours that could not pos­sibly exist? Ima­gine a highly sat­ur­ated yellow… Got it? Now ima­gine the same colour, but com­pletely black… Now, this colour that you are thinking about, it not black. It is as dark as black, but it is still as vibrant as it was before we turned the lights out. Can you still pic­ture it?

As far as Deke’s training titles for Lynda.com go, this series is incred­ibly short—6.5 hours. Deke explains that this is due to the effi­ciency of the colour space. But, truth­fully, an awful lot goes unex­plained, which is very frus­trating. You see, the great cham­pion of Lab Color is an author/instructor called Dan Mar­gulis. Dan is an extraordinary author (we have some of his books in the Insti­tute library—you should read them), and he has written a great book about Lab. As much as I like Deke, Dan is the fore­most expert in the field, and Dan has also recorded an online training series (for Kel­byTraining) about Lab color. So, any review of Deke’s Mas­tering Lab Color, has to deal with Deke’s series in rela­tion to both Dan Mar­gulis’ book, and online training. Against any opponent other than Dan…

I don’t like to see Deke in a bad light—I have enjoyed all of his other titles so much, and things start well. As I have men­tioned, Lab Color is a little obscure, and it is dif­fi­cult to get your head around ini­tially. A colour model that can create ima­ginary col­ours, by defin­i­tion is going to be unlike any­thing that you are familiar with. Deke is a great explainer of tech­nical con­cepts, and his explan­a­tion of the Lab channel struc­ture is far easier to grasp than Dan Mar­gulis’ explanations—or any that I have found else­where. Every concept that I have struggled with in the past is far easier to digest here, than in any of my pre­vious encoun­ters. At this point, I am still in a slightly euphoric state, and looking for­ward to the rest of the exercises…

The next two chapters are great too. Chapter 2 dis­cusses when the Lab Color mode is an appro­priate choice. This is an important concept to be com­fort­able with, because Lab is poten­tially toxic to your images. Knowing when to take advantage of it is a little like making sure that you know which of your friends have nut aller­gies. Lab’s strengths are well explored, and Deke’s explan­a­tions offer a good coun­ter­point to the inform­a­tion in Dan’s book. Ideally you would take in both. If you are an either/or kind of person, you will be more sat­is­fied by what Dan has got to tell you.

Chapter 3 is the high­light of this title, with Deke walking through a non–destructive Lab work­flow. In Dan’s online training titles, he alludes to this, but does not demon­strate it. If your cur­rent work­flow is non–destructive, you will obvi­ously not be keen on incor­por­ating any destructive pro­cesses into it, and Deke demon­strates some fant­astic tech­niques that you will want to incor­porate into your work­flow imme­di­ately. Curi­ously though, there are two methods for con­verting your document’s colour mode into Lab, and Deke only dis­cusses the destructive pro­cess. I am sure that he must know about the other method, and I am a bit con­fused that he did not men­tion it (have a read of Dan’s book to dis­cover the other method).

From here on out though, the title moves into colour cor­rec­tion tech­niques, and—with the excep­tion of the dis­cus­sion of the Shadow/Highlight command—falls off the pro­ver­bial cliff. The Levels com­mand is given far more atten­tion than is sane, and the Curves com­mand (the king of colour cor­rec­tion) is explained more poorly than I would have ever given Deke credit for. Watching Deke give such impre­cise and con­fusing instruc­tion hurt in the same way that the last Radi­o­head album did. It’s hor­rible to have your expect­a­tions crushed like that…

In con­clu­sion then, this title—in places—is a fant­astic coun­ter­point to Dan Mar­gulis’ Lab book, and online training for Kel­byTraining. The tech­nical aspects of the col­ourspace are bril­liantly explained, and I feel that my know­ledge of the struc­ture of Lab has been much improved. Import­antly, I now feel much better equipped to teach other people how to take advantage of the fea­ture. How­ever, it is an incom­plete series, and if it is your only source of inform­a­tion, your images will not ful­fill their poten­tial. Everything else that Deke has developed for Lynda.com is fant­astic, and in places this is too. But remember to enjoy this series as part of a bal­anced diet.

Lee.

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