Photo retouching: between vibrancy and saturation

David Lee

10.6.2019

Translation: machine translated

Stronger colours can be achieved by playing with saturation and vibrance. But what's the difference between these two concepts and what settings need to be made? Read on to find out more!

Photoshop and Lightroom both offer sliders for adjusting vibrance and saturation to achieve brighter, more saturated colours. For many photos, it's not easy to know which slider to choose and whether it adds anything.

Here's an example.

Saturation and vibrance set to neutral: [[image:22245115]]

Saturation at maximum: [[image:22245114]]

Vibrance to the max: [[image:22245123]]

Even with the sliders set to maximum, the differences in colour remain slight. However, this is not the case for all photos.

The difference

Saturation will act on all the colours in the image without any distinction.

Vibrance also manages colour saturation, but only acts on dull colours.

In practice, the "Vibrance" slider accentuates shades of blue, for example, which, for landscape photos, proves very useful. So this function allows you to sublimate a sky or a body of water without the other colours making a carnival of themselves.

Neutral: [[image:22245116]]

Saturation at maximum: the wood appears too coloured. In such a case, a person's skin would look very unnatural. [[image:22245118]]

Vibrance at maximum: the sky and water are extremely bright, the rest of the landscape remains acceptable. [[image:22245117]]

Located above the "Vibrance" slider, the "Veil Correction" feature in Lightroom and Camera Raw also affects the colour of the sky by setting it to maximum. At the same time, the darkest areas of the image become even darker, increasing contrast. The result? The sky - especially the upper part - which is naturally darker, stands out with a much richer blue.

Here's another picture with a bit more sky. Neutral first: [[image:22245120]]

Correcting the veil:

Normally, we don't set the "Veil Correction" slider to maximum. Even though on Instagram the general rule seems to be oversaturation, I personally avoid setting these three sliders to maximum.

David Lee

Senior Editor

David.Lee@digitecgalaxus.ch

My interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.

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