In this work, we have tested a color based segmentation approach that uses the CIELab color space. We use a color reduction approach where the dominant color database is obtained from the analysis of the entire Berkeley natural image database. After experiments using single color components and all their possible combinations as the segmentation basis, we have found that ab is the best color component combination for the segmentation task. F measures and Precision Recall graphs are used as the evidence for this conclusion.