
Originally Posted by
Emil Martinec
The sharpening seems to have helped. Nice posture and color.
Note that every time you change modes the image is degraded some. If you want to achieve the effect of LAB mode sharpening, one route is to duplicate the image onto a new layer, sharpen the layer, then set the blending mode of the sharpened layer to luminosity. Same effect but nondestructive. You can also slightly oversharpen and adjust the opacity to taste, make a layer mask to mask off parts that you don't want sharpened, etc, etc.
I have never found a convincing reason to do anything in LAB mode, always being able to find an equivalent procedure while remaining in RGB mode, producing the same effect without the losses entailed of switching back and forth. For instance, a common color enhancement technique uses a steepened curve adjustment on the AB channels in LAB mode; the same effect can be achieved using the same curve on a curves adjustment layer in RGB mode with the blending mode set to "color".