CIELAB
CIE L*a*b* (CIELAB) is the most complete color space specified by the International Commission on Illumination (French Commission internationale de l'éclairage, hence its CIE initialism). It describes all the colors visible to the human eye and was created to serve as a device-independent model to be used as a reference.
The three coordinates of CIELAB represent the lightness of the color (L* = 0 yields black and L* = 100 indicates diffuse white; specular white may be higher), its position between red/magenta and green (a*, negative values indicate green while positive values indicate magenta) and its position between yellow and blue (b*, negative values indicate blue and positive values indicate yellow). The asterisk (*) after L, a and b are pronounced star and are part of the full name, since they represent L*, a* and b*, to distinguish them from Hunter's L, a, and b, described below.
Since the L*a*b* model is a three-dimensional model, it can only be represented properly in a three-dimensional space. Two-dimensional depictions include chromaticity diagrams: sections of the color solid with a fixed lightness. It is crucial to realize that the visual representations of the full gamut of colors in this model are never accurate; they are there just to help in understanding the concept.
Because the red-green and yellow-blue opponent channels are computed as differences of lightness transformations of (putative) cone responses, CIELAB is a chromatic value color space.
A related color space, the CIE 1976 (L*, u*, v*) color space (a.k.a. CIELUV), preserves the same L* as L*a*b* but has a different representation of the chromaticity components. CIELUV can also be expressed in cylindrical form (CIELCH), with the chromaticity components replaced by correlates of chroma and hue.
Since CIELAB and CIELUV, the CIE has been incorporating an increasing number of color appearance phenomena into their models, to better model color vision. These color appearance models, of which CIELAB is a simple example, culminated with CIECAM02.
Read more about this topic: Lab Color Space