Reddit mentions of Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace

By any chance have you read Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum? It goes into a lot of detail about driving apart similar colors to different areas of the colorspace, and uses canyon images like this one for the examples in many cases.

This is hands down the best book on how to expose images properly that I've ever seen.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0817439390/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

If you're going to get tits deep into photoshop, check out this book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321356780/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1368307335&sr=8-1&pi=SL75

Go get Lightroom 5. It is in beta and it is free.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom5/

http://www.moderncolorworkflow.com/dan-margulis

https://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-LAB-Color-Adventures-Colorspace/dp/0321356780

Both are good books on color, color correction and color theory.

So I've got $300 of Amazon credit (yay credit card rewards) and I have no clue what to buy.

I mostly shoot Micro 4/3 (Olympus OM-D E-M5) and I've got ~300GB of SD cards, 17mm, 45mm primes and a couple of zoom lenses I never use, a decent tripod, a polarizing filter and a ColorChecker Passport.

Usually I shoot when I'm out with my friends or with my girlfriend so mostly portraits and street photography but occasionally city/landscapes as well.

I haven't really done much with lighting so far but I'm thinking of learning so would it be a good idea to buy some lighting equipment? I've played with Photoshop and DxO 10 quite a bit so that's another idea and my home server is running a rather volatile set of hard drives so that's the last idea I had in mind.

I even had a look at switching to a Nikon D5200 for the extra 2 stops of dynamic range but decided it wasn't worth it since I don't find myself needing it that often.

Honestly I think I should have cashed in my credit card rewards for cash and taken some lessons instead but it's a bit late for that.

To sum up, these are the ideas I currently have:

• Hard drives for NAS
  
• Lighting equipment
  
• DxO Optics Pro
  
• Photoshop CC subscription
  
• Fisheye or wider angle lens (can anyone recommend a good landscape lens on M4/3?)
  
• Books? Online courses or other educational materials? (this has seemed interesting)
  
  If you were in my place what would you choose?

No, the LAB color space. This book is a good introduction to the powerful things you can do in LAB that you can't easily do in RGB or CMYK because luminosity is separate from color

I have a lot of books on color correction and out of all of them I rank this the highest: http://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-LAB-Color-Adventures-Colorspace/dp/0321356780

It's a little long in the tooth now (2005) but the theory is still sound. However I just saw that the author of that book has a new(er) book out as well that I might pick up:
http://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-Workflow-Quartertone-Quandary-Enhancement/dp/0988280809

He's both technical and practical in his advice and more technically minded than a lot of the color correction books out there.

This guy really is spot on in his technique. I read his book on LAB colour about 5 years ago and it changed my workflow forever. Here's a link to amazon.

Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace

edit - formatted link properly