implications for newspaper folk

Off the side of a side road, I came across this little item:

A study by Miriam Law Smith of whether human face color counts when it comes to assessments of mating worthiness shed some light on an area I hadn't expected. Smith said that when the time came to manipulate the reds and yellows in people's faces (facial redness turns out to be widely viewed as desirable, so drink up!), using lab color was the best choice (most lifelike, evidently), as opposed to operating in RGB (or CMYK, for that matter).

Of course, the natural inclination for press types is to operate in CMYK, because for all its pitfalls, it is the color that's used on the press.

Lab color, unlike the sorta primary color scheme used on the multimillion-dollar machines, is a way to tinker with lightness as well as, if you by the Wikipedia account, redness and greenness.

Would this mean we'd be best off adjusting images in lab color, then converting? Who knows. Adjusting in RGB then converting sometimes results in a loss of fidelity, no doubt on account of the inherent limitations of CMYK (muddy waters ahead!).

But this is certainly information that begs experimentation!