Saturation vs vibrancy: which one to use, and why skin cares
Published · 4 min read
A photo looks a little grey, so you push Saturation. The sky improves, and so does the grass, and so does everyone's face, which is now orange. Vibrancy exists to solve exactly that. The two sliders sit next to each other and are often treated as one; they are not.
Saturation
Saturation scales the intensity of every colour by the same amount. A colour that was already strong becomes stronger, and a weak one becomes a little less weak. At +30 a red jumper is vivid, a blue sky is deep, and skin, which is a pale orange, is noticeably more orange. Pushed further, strong colours hit the limit of what the file can store and turn into flat blocks with no detail inside them. Negative Saturation drains colour evenly, down to black and white at -100.
Vibrancy
Vibrancy is selective. It boosts colours in proportion to how muted they are, so a dull colour gets a large lift and an already saturated one barely moves. On top of that it detects the range of hues that skin falls into and holds back there. In Raspy the skin-tone mask reduces the effect by up to 70% in those hues, the same idea Apple's slider uses. The result is a photo whose colour looks richer while the people in it still look like themselves.
Which to use
- Any photo with a person in it: Vibrancy. Start around +20 and rarely go past +40.
- Landscapes, food, objects: either. Vibrancy is still the safer first move because it will not blow out the colours that were already strong.
- A deliberately punchy look: Saturation, in small amounts, after Vibrancy.
- Calming a photo down: negative Saturation. Negative Vibrancy works too and leaves skin tones intact, which makes for a more natural muted look.
When the colour is wrong rather than weak
Sometimes the problem is not strength but a cast: a photo under warm indoor lighting that has gone yellow, or one in shade that has gone blue. No amount of Saturation fixes that; it only makes the cast stronger. The tools for it are the next two sliders down.
Warmth slides the whole image between blue and amber. Drag left to cool a yellow indoor shot, right to warm a blue shade shot. Tint slides between green and magenta, and fixes the green cast from fluorescent tubes or the magenta cast some LEDs produce. Between them they are a manual white balance. Find something in the photo that should be neutral grey or white, and move the two sliders until it is.
A habit worth keeping
Colour is the easiest thing to overdo, because a stronger version always looks better for the first second. Set the slider, then hold the photo to compare with the original. If the original looks drained, you were right. If the original looks normal and the edit looks like a sweet wrapper, halve the value.