Vibrance or Saturation, Which One to Use?

Editing

Jan 12

I almost always prioritize vibrance to boost the colors on my images. Most of the time, I use a mix of both vibrance and saturation, but before getting into the details, let’s just zoom out and understand their differences and how they affect your photos.

Saturation

Saturation adjusts the intensity of all colors equally across the image.

It has a strong effect, so it can quickly make an image appear too saturated and unnatural.

Extra caution is needed on photos with people as the skin tones are very sensitive to high saturation.

Vibrance

Vibrance is a smarter tool; it adjusts the intensity of less saturated colors while protecting already saturated tones.

It is also a lot more gentle to the skin tones, making it ideal for portraits or images with people.

Overall, a more subtle tool and can often create a more natural-looking enhancement compared to saturation.

When to Use Each

• Vibrance: In most cases, Vibrance will be the best tool to use to boost the colors on your images. People, landscape, street almost any photography genre will benefit from using vibrance in priority vs saturation.

• Saturation: Saturation can do the job and can be used alone on pictures without people on them, but I always find the results with vibrance looking better. Saturation can be here to support the heavy lifting done by the vibrance slider. If you already pushed vibrance significantly, you can add a touch of saturation (from +5 to +15) to give your image that final little boost in a heaven way because as we saw before, saturation affects all colors.

Practical Workflow (With Presets)

Apply Your Preset First: Presets often include HSL adjustments that are carefully crafted to achieve a specific look. Start by applying your chosen preset to see how it influences the colors in your image.
Assess the Image: Once the preset is applied, evaluate whether the colors need further tweaking.
Adjust Vibrance First: Vibrance is the best way to subtly enhance the colors that the preset didn’t fully bring out. Being a more gentle tool, don’t hesitate to bring it up to high values like +50 and above to see how it looks, and park it somewhere you like.
Fine-Tune Saturation If Necessary: If the overall image still feels too flat or lacks impact, carefully adjust the saturation slider.
Preserve the HSL Settings: Vibrance and saturation tweaks often complement presets without needing to dive into detailed HSL edits. But if any specific color looks off, you can dig deeper into the HSL or even the Color Point tool to make very precise adjustments.

Preset applied (01 Classic from the v3 Pack)

Preset + Color Boost applied (+50 Vibrance +5 Saturation)

Practical Workflow (Without Presets)

Without presets, I recommend using the information shared above and boosting the colors, giving the priority to vibrance and using saturation for a final kick. I also recommend spending some time on the HSL tab and then come back to the vibrance and saturation sliders after that.

The only time I use saturation over vibrance

Take everything I said until here and keep challenging these principles. By doing so and experimenting with other combinations, I found specific situations where I use more saturation than vibrance. This photo I took in Miyajima is a great example. By boosting saturation and bringing down vibrance, it allows me to enrich the red and orange tones from the mighty flowing Torii while keeping the blue and cyan tones from the sky under control, slightly muted. Basically, a combination of minus vibrance and positive saturation can be a good solution when you want a boost of colors without ending up with an overpowering sky. You could also work with the HSL tool to achieve similar results, but I like to limit the use of very specific sliders, using more the general sliders like basic adjustments, vibrance, and saturation to avoid any unnatural result. That’s the power but also the risk of these very specific sliders.