This Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSVis rather critical to HSV/HSL/HIS color models for editing, and advocates Lab. In contrast, Tindemans, in a comment to his Tonability plug-in, says
"Using complete hue and saturation locking in RGB mode is equivalent to applying a brightness curve in the HSB representation. HSB brightness appears to be a surprisingly good measure for perceived illumination."
http://simon.tindemans.eu/tools/tonabilityI also remember that Andrew Rodney states that Lab is not perceptually uniform.
PhotoLine offers editing in HSV and HIS, in addition to RGB and Lab. So I did a little test.
The test image is too dark. I applied a Spline curve of x=50%, y=70% in an adjustment layer.
For the Lab, HIS and HSV models, PhotoLine allows the curves applied to either just the Lightness/Brightness ("grau" in my image titles) or to all channels, and I tried both.
Here are the results as screen shots from my not-hardware-calibrated MacBook Pro Retina screen. Png's converted to jpeg's of 70% quality.
My choice is HSV, either just the V ("grau") or all channels.