Lab Colour Space

The L*a*b colour space answers the purpose of exactly defining perceptible colours, which means among other things that it ignores UV and infrared light, but encompasses more colours than the CMYK colour space (print) or the RGB colour space (monitors). It is based on the colour opponent process and opposes the following pairs of colours: white and black on the L axis, red and green on the a axis, yellow and blue on the b axis. So a colour can be represented through a colour point in a three-dimensional coordinate system.

Above all else, the Lab colour space was developed in order to capture colours so that the distance between two colour points corresponds to the colour difference perceived by human beings. In this three-dimensional space, two colours perceived as similar lie close together; very different colours are far apart.