MewLAB uses the LAB color space

What does this mean? When mixing colors in this space, the resulting colors will be different than what is usually expected when mixing colors digitally.

Nearly every application you have used in your life probably used the RGB color space to calculate how colors transition from one to another. RGB has upsides, such as being very easy to convert to information for screens to render, and being a straightforward way of representing colors.

However, RGB space has downsides too. It has a tendency to make colors darker when mixed. Check out these unpleasant gradients:

Damn, that is unpleasant

Decent looking gradients with clashing clown colors? This is possible when you use other color spaces. LAB (used in the above gradients) is a color space that attempts to maintain a consistent perceptual brightness between colors of the same lightness value.

What is LAB?

LAB is also known as CIELAB and can be written as L*a*b*. It stands for 3 values that make up a color: L* is Lightness, a* represents the red to green value, and b* represents the blue to yellow value. Lightness goes from 0 to 100%, and a* and b* both range from -100% to 100%. The color picker in MewLAB gives you sliders for each of these, so you can see how changing the values affects the chosen color.

Is it possible to use this space in other programs?

The only free digital painting program with LAB color space support is Krita. Other programs might have a LAB color picker as an option, while the canvas is still in RGB space, or might have LAB color space support but are meant for photograph editing.

Picker - It has a LAB color space color picker

Space - The canvas itself can be in LAB space (like MewLAB)

Did you know this page's color scheme is dynamically generated using LAB colors? Try holding CTRL or SHIFT while clicking a color swatch.