Pixiq

The Saturation and its cousin the Vibrancy slider are the two main tools one would use to saturate colors in an image. The Vibrancy slider was one of those revolutionary tools that helped make Adobe Lightroom an indispensable tool for processing my raw images. I know that shortly after Adobe created this tool for Lightroom, the folks at Apple Aperture followed suit with their own version of this slider that is very similar. I am not going to talk about how these tools work here specifically but I will offer up some personal experience with these puppies.

The Vibrancy slider increases saturation but only selectively – basically it increases saturation in those areas of an image that are less saturated and also respects skin tones as well so that saturation can be pumped up without detrimental affects on the subjects in your image. Of course this is a very crude definition of exactly how it works but for the majority of us this is all we need to know. The Saturation slider by comparison increases or decreases saturation in a linear manner for all colors.

Over the last few years using Lightroom and before that Adobe Camera Raw, I learned a lot about just how much I could pump up the colors in an image (if the image warranted it) via the Saturation slider and then later the Vibrancy slider. The first consideration when applying saturation or vibrancy is to understand how your image will be output. Are you going to print it on an ink jet printer? Is it going on the web? Or is it going to be sent to a magazine and printed on CMYK presses?

If you are going to just be posting images on your website then one can take the overall saturation of an image a fair bit farther than if it is going out to a magazine which is printed on web presses using CMYK color processes. In general if I am increasing saturation in an image I never go above +15 on Saturation or +50 with the Vibrancy slider. Of course these are extremes for my work, I’m sure there are circumstances where images could be pushed beyond these numbers for a particular look. And sometimes, quite often actually, I am increasing vibrancy just a bit (+5 or so) and decreasing the overall saturation (- 4 or even lower) to help keep skin tones slightly desaturated but pump up the saturation in other parts of the image.

How much saturation you add or subtract from your image depends on personal taste. Just be aware that with both the saturation and vibrancy sliders if you go too far it is easy to create wild colors that are not reproducible on the web or in print. Hence, go easy with the saturation.

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael

................................

This article is an excerpt from my digital workflow e-book. If you are interested in developing a complete workflow of your own using Lightroom, I would recommend checking out my Lightroom Workflow e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographers Workflow. You can purchase that eBook for the low price of 24.95 on my website.

This e-book presents a complete workflow which includes my in-camera settings, how to determining the optimum white balance and exposure, color management, working with Lightroom and Photoshop, creating web galleries, Noise Ninja and much, much more. A sample table of contents is available for download on my website if you want to see exactly what is covered. The e-books is also up to date and covers the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop.