Lord love a duck...

[Tildy]

(...which is a British expression -- it means, approximately, 'Oh my goodness' )

LAB duck:

RGB duck:

I'm not sure which is better, honestly. It seems that you'd use them for different purposes. The LAB way seems to provide richer colour, but it also seems like it might be difficult to get the overall colour cast right -- for example, on the screen here, my duck looks a bit green, because I was focusing on maximising the colour in the plants. My white also looks a bit blown-out. The RGB way, while resulting in more muted colour, seems to provide more of an overall balance, and then individual areas of the photo can be colour-corrected later.

Also, now that I stare at it, there appears to be more detail in the RGB duck's white stomach.

[gregmeister_admin]

Tildy,
LAB is a very strong adjustment tool.

You only get 1 neutral so you have to choose your neutral with great care in LAB. In the more advanced workflows you set the color balance in RGB with multiple neutrals and use LAB later to make the color pop. Your LAB duck is green no doubt.

Take your RGB duck back into CM and try a LAB adjustment on it. Once you have a good neutral image making the colors come out is VERY easy in LAB.

Greg

[Tildy]

Re-try with LAB, placing the black and grey points differently:

[gregmeister_admin]

Tildy,
You can drag the shadow point around the image and when you do the "shadow mask" will show up on the screen. move the shadow point around until you see very few black spots on the mask. that will be the deepest shadow you can safely set. same for the highlight.

In the LAB part of this you can just crank up the saturation slider for now.

Greg

[Tildy]

Here's the RGB duck adjusted in LAB -- not sure if it's better?? I may have been too cautious about boosting the colour.

[gregmeister_admin]

Looks quite nice.
You might want to open the shadows a bit more but for now this looks great.

Good Job.

Greg