The Saturation Trap

Smarter Colour Editing in Lightroom and Photoshop

RAW photo editors like Lightroom have blunt tools that make dramatic changes and precise tools that make measured ones. Floodlights and spotlights, if you like.

And the saturation and vibrance sliders in any editor definitely fall into that ‘floodlight’ category - they make drastic changes to a photo, particularly if pushed more than a few percent each way - and should therefore be used only in moderation.

But it’s not just the strength of sliders like saturation and vibrance, it’s the knock-on impacts that they have on photographs, that you then have to undo with some other tool. The classic saturation slider, for instance, boosts perceived brightness at the same time as saturation. That’s why the colours pop, but it’s also why they end up looking fake and clipping out of gamut.

So if you want to tweak the colours in your photograph there are better ways of doing it that don’t require further patch-up work later on.