RGB vs. LAB Color-space for Averaging

Post date: May 10, 2010 2:51:59 PM

One of my new projects involved calculating the average color over several pixels. At first I did this straight forward using RGB. The results where however a bit pale, which made me wonder about alternatives. I converted my images into the LAB color space calculated the average there, and then converted the average back into RGB. I was surprised about the nice results. Here are two images for comparison.

Every pixel in these two images are the averaged color from 1024 pixels (more on exactly what these images show later) and the LAB averaged image shows much more saturated details.