The RGB color space works, it just has light encoded in each channel (making it unnormalized). Separating out the light, i.e. normalizing on the color is what g

The RGB color space works, it just has light encoded in each channel (making it unnormalized). Separating out the light, i.e. normalizing on the color is what gives LAB the advantage. Further, because the way RGB is structured taking the difference between channels is more difficult (requires more calculations) than it does for the a & b channels. For instance, the a channel represents red to green, or positive a represents red and negative a represents green. This aids in finding edges between red and green with a simple addition/subtraction between pixels(a[i,i] - a[j,j]). If we were to try the same thing in the RGB space it would look something like (R[i,i] + G[i,i]) - (R[j,j] + G[j,j]), and you would still have the impact of light to deal with...