The Saturation and its cousin the Vibrancy slider are the two main tools one would use to saturate the colors in an image. The Vibrancy slider was one of those revolutionary tools that helped make Lightroom an indispensable tool for processing my raw images. I am not going to talk about how these tools work here specifically but offer up some personal experience with these puppies.

As most people using Lightroom know, 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 effects 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. Hence when adding saturation to any image I would suggest starting with the Vibrancy slider and then use the Saturation slider if the image needs a bit more pop.

I have written blog posts before that detail color and how our sense of color has changed with the digital revolution. You can read that blog post here.

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 web? Or is it going to be sent to a magazine and printed on CMYK presses?

If you are going to be posting images on your website then one can take the saturation 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 above +40 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 you'll create wild colors that are not reproducible on the web or in print. If you are outputting images that will later be converted to CMYK be very careful with both the vibrancy and saturation sliders. If you go too far you'll see "out of gamut" colors when you do critical CMYK color conversions. So, as a rule, go easy with the saturation.

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

Adios, Michael