I'm building a color separation engine for screen printing that operates entirely in CIELab — Photoshop is hardwired for it, so while OKLab is mathematically su

I'm building a color separation engine for screen printing that operates entirely in CIELab — Photoshop is hardwired for it, so while OKLab is mathematically superior for hue linearity, the constant translation overhead isn't worth it when you're doing surgery on 16-bit photography into discrete spot-color plates. The real proof of moving away from Euclidean RGB distances isn't in the composite — it's in the separated plates. Look at the individual channels of a complex texture like weathered terracotta through a Lab-aware engine, and the structural integrity of the gradients is night and day compared to legacy indexing. Even 1976-era Lab is a massive leap from RGB heuristics.