I've been reading Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace by Dan Margulis. I must say I'm impressed with the utility of doing certain kinds of color correction work in LAB color space. It's very useful for bringing out color variation in an image in the way that a skilled painter does when he adds that certain "pop" to his work.
The author's story is at times long in the telling, but there is some undeniably useful information here. It's like a secret weapon. I can't believe this isn't more widely known material [among the people I meet in Los Angeles film and visual effects post-production.]
Actually, the methods are well-known, particularly in the pre-press world. Dan Margulis popularized them for many years in his book Photoshop Professional. I'm using LAB routinely for color-correction and I did it for at least 5 years.
Yes, thanks for writing. Clearly you are right, there is a large body of people who use these techniques routinely. I haven't done a lot of prepress work since the early 90's when we started RGA/Print at R/Greenberg Associates [now RGA Digital Studios] in Manhattan, so I don't come across them.
I can say that among the people I meet in Los Angeles who do color correction for film I do not see these techniques in common use.
The nice thing is that many compositing packages (at least After Effects and Digital Fusion) offer you the possibility of converting to LAB and back, so it's quite easy to use that colorspace with them. I also checked the demo of Nuke 4.5 and it also offers conversion to LAB and LCH.
The books of Dan Margulis are almost exclusively bought by pre-press people, but Photoshop Professional is full of very good techniques for color correction and channel blending which can be applied to film work very well, no matter the compositing package used.
How do you convert to lab in After Effects? That would be great to do.