Vibrance & Saturation - How they work

It is probably accurate to say that most photo editing software programs have ways to adjust Vibrance and Saturation. Usually it is done with a slider. It also probably accurate to say that any of you who use photo editing software have used these sliders, but do you really understand what is going on when you do?

I use them regularly and it is easy to see the effect they have on your photo which is basically to enhance the color in your photos.; however, it wasn’t until I read an article by Tim Grey and did additional research on the subject that I really understood what was happening. Basically both tools increase or decrease the intensity of the colors in your photo. Saturation tools do this evenly to all the colors in your photo. Vibrance tools balance the intensity of the colors in your photos. In other word Vibrance tools increase the color intensity of colors that are not highly saturated while not having as great an effect on colors that are already highly saturated thus balancing the overall intensity of the colors in your photo. Below are simple definitions of each taken from a Digital Photography School article on the subject.

Saturation – “Saturation is a uniform bumping up the intensity of all colors in your shot, regardless of the starting point of the colors. This can result in clipping (over saturation of certain colors which results in loss of detail in those areas) and over saturation of skin tones leaving them looking too orange and unnatural.”

Vibrance – “Vibrance is a smart-tool which cleverly increases the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors alone. It’s sort of like fill light, but for colors. Vibrance also prevents skin tones from becoming overly saturated and unnatural.”

There is another aspect of Vibrance controls. That is Vibrance controls are specifically designed to have little effect on skin tones which are mostly orange and yellow. That means that if you have photos with people in them and you want to boost the saturation of the colors in the photo the Vibrance control is your best option. For a better explanation of this you can take a look at this YouTube video.

OK. Think you’ve got the concept down? Well hold on. Not all Saturation tools are created equal. For instance in Photoshop there are the Hue adjustment tool and the Vibrance adjustment tool and each has a Saturation slider; however, they work differently. Here is a YouTube video that explains how they each work.

Hopefully you will now have a better idea of what these tools do, how they work, and when to use each.