What is the difference between vibrance and saturation in photoshop

The secondary colours of Orange and Green receive a significant uplift across the whole range of saturations but not quite as strong as the Reds. The skin tones all take on a marked orange tint after application of this form of saturation. This would probably look unappealing and unnatural in photographs containing people, even if applied minimally. Obviously, these are very extreme examples to help highlight the limitations and finesse of the different tools.

With the Vibrance Slider, it is much easier to curb your enthusiasm as this tool will not allow you to take the colours too far beyond acceptability. This is an important consideration for a lot of photographers who like to include people in their compositions. The main goal is to produce an image with natural looking skin tones. This tool could be used successfully to add a little warmth to the skin tones, a healthy glow to uplift a pallid, anaemic pallor if the composition supports that kind of mood lift.

This is much more unforgiving on the outcome of skin tones. The skin takes on a mixture of unnatural looking orange and red tones. It also strongly boosts the other colours in the image so very quickly this photo could become overwhelmingly cartoonish. It would be wise to exercise some caution when applying this tool to human portraits. Not to say that it should never be used, just to be careful and move the slider in small increments.

This was the original tool for adjusting Saturation in PhotoShop and it was rather unsophisticated compared to the Vibrance tool which came later. When misused, it can be the most damaging to skin tones. Taken to the extreme, like in our example above, the skin tones become horribly vivid, almost unrecognisable as human.

The deep orange and red tones start to become posterised and clipped causing loss of detail. The subtlety of shading becomes lost and overall the image begins to resemble graphic Pop Art.

When you shoot in RAW your images can look a little dull and flat overall as they have had no processing like a Jpeg has had, particularly if you shot in flat, overcast light. In the process, the vibrance slider also leaves the colours that are already well-saturated, so they do not end up looking more out of place.

This slider acts as a fill light, but just for colors. In addition to that, this slider also works in preventing the skin tones from becoming overly saturated and helps them preserve the natural color. In most cases, you are to use vibrance and saturation slider in tandem, so you can get the perfect results. Recommended reading: What is Dynamic Range? Everything you need to know! The difference is obvious, and I have already explained to you how you can differentiate between both.

Honestly, it is not that difficult to conclude, but I am still going to mention everything there is that you must know. Vibrance serves as the most convenient tool when the photograph has the right balance of colour intensity in all areas except one.

Technically, by using the vibrance slider, you can elevate or bring down the colour intensity of that one or two areas, and this is all done without overdoing the areas of the picture that are already looking perfect in terms of colours.

You have to have a proper understanding of colours to be able to do this properly. Not just that, you will also need a display that can display all the colours that are present in the picture because, without that, it becomes really difficult to get started with how you are going to take the picture and adjust these aspects of it.

Most of the modern editing displays already have proper displays, so adjust these sliders is going to be an easy thing for you. Next up, we have saturation, and during my years in photography and photo editing, I can tell you that using this slider has been a lot easier than using vibrance. Now, I am not saying that you cannot master both sliders as that is an important thing that you have to do, and without that, you will not be able to take the photos the way you want to take them.

With the saturation slider, the difference is noticeable almost immediately, and this is not like that with the vibrance slider. Saturation refers to the intensity of the color; the higher the saturation of a color, the more vivid it is going to be. Similarly, the lower the saturation of the colour, the closer it will become grey. There are some photos in which the colour intensity is a lot higher, and you have to bring down the saturation to give it a muting or a calming effect to make it look more natural.

However, at the end of the day, it is a mix of both saturation and vibrance sliders that will give you the picture you want. This is especially important when working in fields such as fashion or portrait photography , as skin tones can easily appear unnatural as saturation is increased.

Decreasing the saturation or vibrance of a photograph also produces quite distinct results. A desaturated image will only show gray tones, which leads to monochrome photos. On the other hand, reduced vibrance affects only certain colors in the image, and thus the final result does display muted tones. Ideally, vibrance and saturation should be used in sync accordingly to the specific needs of each image.

Doing so will allow you to control the overall saturation intensity of the colors while giving dull tones a little vibrance push. This is the reason why most free photo editing software programs followed the steps of Adobe and integrate both tools within their offerings.

If all the colors in the image appear dull, go for saturation in order to give an overall bust. It's particularly important to me to understand how best to protect skin tones when retouching portraits since I'm color blind. It was really the main reason I went with Canon, since they tend to nail the color science for skin tones right out of the camera.

But occasionally I still need to do a bit of adjustment in post if my white balance is off. I end up nudging my white balance a little most of the time normally a little warmer , but I agree, the Canon skin tones are always great as soon as the WB is dialed in. Vibrance in Lightroom is excellent for when images need just a little "pop" without looking cartoonish. Home Topics Photoshop.