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there are tons of ways of definnig colors on computers or elsewhere.

RGB - Red Green Blue
CMYK - Cyan Magenta Yellow Black (used a K instead of B because the cyan is sometimes referred to as blue and would create confusion)
LAB - Luminosity and A & B channel

lab is good because the colors possible to create in that channel are huge (more than the visible specturm). there is also only one definition of lab color.

RGB there is mutilple ways to defining the colors.  a color with 125 R 125 G and 100 B will look different if you choose Adobe RGB, Prophoto RGB, or sRGB, or many of the other methods.  sRGB has relativly few colors while Adobe RGB has more and prophoto has the most.

Lab is especially good at editing when you want to bring in fairly big changes in the brightness darkness of the image because you can change the luminosity channel (in curves for example) without touching the colors.  with RGB you have to move the colors to get them brighter. 

for a great book on Lab check out


I purchased it a while ago and am still slugging my way through it.  It goes from easy things for everyone to benefit from to super hard stuff in the end that will confuse everyone... so a great read and some great tips and info.

well i suppose how determined you are to understand.

if you just take it bit by bit, you will come a long ways.

If you are croping, using levels, saturation and cloning you are ahead of a lot of people.