Design Center Tutorial
Boost an image’s saturation
Vibrance vs. Saturation
Both the Vibrance and Saturation sliders can be used to boost the saturation in an image. The difference between the two is that whereas the Saturation slider applies a linear adjustment to the color saturation, a Vibrance adjustment uses a non-linear approach. In plain English, this means that when you apply a Vibrance adjustment, the less saturated colors will get more of a saturation boost than those colors that are already saturated. This can be of real practical benefit when applying a saturation adjustment to a picture where you want to make the softer colors look brighter, but don’t want to brighten them at the expense of losing important detail in the already bright colors. In the Figure 1 example, I have demonstrated how a Saturation boost can easily damage the color information in an image. The other benefit of working with Vibrance is that it has a built-in skin color protector that should filter out colors that fall within the skin color range. This can be useful if you are editing a portrait and you want to boost the color of someone’s clothing, but at the same time, you don’t want to over-saturate their skin tones. On the whole, I would suggest that Vibrance is the only saturation control you ever really need. However, the Saturation control remains useful still. As you can see in Figure 2, a Saturation adjustment is useful for making big shifts to the saturation, such as when you want to dramatically subdue the colors in a photograph.
Figure 1: In the top screen shot, I increased the Vibrance to 60%. This resulted in the flowers appearing more saturated than they were originally, but without oversaturating to the point where detail was lost. In the lower screen shot I increased the Saturation slider by the same amount. The Saturation will boost all colors equally and as you can see here, there is a lot of clipping in the saturated red colors.
Figure 2: In the top screen shot I applied a negative Vibrance of -100%. As you can see, the effect is quite subtle and this is an effective tool for making gentle reductions in the color saturation. If you take the Saturation slider all the way to -100%, you will end up with a monochrome image, in the bottom screen shot, I reduced the Saturation to -80%, and this produced a pastel color version of the image.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, check out the following resources:
- Photoshop Lightroom Design Center
- Manage before and after previews in Photoshop Lightroom, by Martin Evening
- Keep your images organized by using keywords, by Scott Kelby
- Correct an overexposed image, by Martin Evening
