Recently back from Africa and the one new control that I’m really liking to finesse my images is the Vibrancy slider, in the Enhance Set of adjustments.

We used to have just Saturation which meant punching up or taking away color globally from the entire scene, but the new kid is Vibrancy and it really works. It differs from Saturation in that it won’t change all colors in the scene, since it was designed to be used for for images with people in them. So it will increase or decrease saturation in most colors, but tends to effect neutral and skin tone colors much less.

Adding Saturation will punch up the color all through the images including skin tones, which may make for an unnatural look. Photo Steve Simon

Adding Vibrancy means juicing up the color throughout the image, but much less so in neutral and skin tone areas for natural and beautiful color images of people. Photo Steve Simon

But instead of increasing saturation in the image, I’m finding that I like the more monochrome look of images with the Vibrancy Slider moved to the left, decreasing the saturation slightly which I have found works really well with my low key, darker images of people in low light.

It helps reduce color casts in the skin tones without desaturating the other colors as much, again, different from the Saturation Slider. Some of my favorite color images have very little color in them.