I've recently been learning a lot about the L*a*b (or Lab) color space, for image manipulation.
To see why, here's a simple experiment you can do: Open up an image in Photoshop and convert it from RGB mode to Lab Color mode. Add a Curves effect layer (or just edit the curve) and tweak the a and b channels. Choke them down so that a 90% input equals a 100% output, and a 10% input equals a 0% output.
Now compare the original image to the tweak. You can't do this by simply turning up the saturation, either...
So here's some stuff dealing with L*a*b color. More to come on this topic, for sure.