Lightroom Saturation vs Vibrance, What’s the Difference?

In this video, I explore the difference between Saturation and Vibrance in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Camera Raw. Adobe saws that these sliders work one way; I say they work another. Who is right? I have many examples with visible light images and a test to show you exactly how each works.

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Transcript for Lightroom Saturation vs Vibrance, What’s the Difference?. Duration: 8:31.

• 0:00 Adobe's description of saturation and vibrance may not be accurate. Adobe's documentation says one thing, but my test shows something different, and I've got receipts. Which one is right? I think a more accurate description of saturation and vibrance makes them more useful to photographers.
• 0:18 Let's dive into the details. In my courses on infrared photography for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, I describe the difference between saturation and vibrance. Saying that saturation has a greater impact on warmer hues and vibrance has a greater impact on cooler hues. Someone pointed out that this is different than Adobe's
• 0:40 documentation, which indicates that saturation absolutely impacts all colors equally and vibrance prioritizes less intense colors while smartly protecting skin tones. Let's look at an example, a test, and then compare that to what Adobe says. First the image. This particular image I have set a color profile.
• 1:03 I have done some basic adjustments, so let's take a look at what vibrance and saturation does to this full color image. So we'll start with saturation. So if I take saturation and I slide it all the way to 100%, you'll see that it has a pretty dramatic impact on the warm tones in this image.
• 1:20 So the reds, the oranges, the yellows, the greens of the foliage all brighten up, but it has very little impact on the blues in the water and the violets off in the distance and up here in the shadows. Let's do that again. So we'll reset saturation and then we'll increase saturation to 100%.
• 1:38 I'll do that a few more times so you can compare zero to 100%. Again, we're looking at the warm hues in the foliage and the greens and compare that to the cooler hues in the water, the sky, and in the distance where we're going to see more violets. So full saturation, no saturation.
• 1:58 Now let's take a look at the vibrance slider and do the same thing. So we'll take the vibrance slider and we'll slide that all the way up to 100 and this time we get very different results. We see that the water has been impacted, the blue, the purple in the water, the sky has been brought out a little bit.
• 2:16 And if we look at the distance at this mountain in the distance and if we look in the shadows up here in the mountains in the distance, the violets in those areas are brought out. So let's do this again and we'll reset it a few times so we can take a look at it. So vibrance at 100%.
• 2:30 Now to zero, we'll go to 100% and to zero. The other thing you can do is look at the foreground when we're doing this. Are the warm hues being impacted by vibrance? So vibrance up, just a touch but not a lot and vibrance to zero. Vibrance up and vibrance to zero. Let's go back and do saturation again so we can compare those.
• 2:53 Saturation up and saturation to zero. So that gives you a good idea of what the differences are between saturation and vibrance in a full color image. Saturation impacting the reds, oranges, yellows and greens and the vibrance having more of an impact on the cyan's blues and purples.
• 3:14 Now let's see what's really happening with an experiment. I created this gradient in Photoshop. The hues run left to right at full color saturation. The luminance ranges from top to bottom with full luminance at the top is white. No luminance at the bottom is black. I loaded this image into Lightroom Classic, applied various
• 3:34 saturation and vibrance settings, exported the results and loaded them back into layers in this image in Photoshop. So now let's have a look. The first thing we want to do is compare our default image to an image with full saturation. So I'll turn on this layer that has full saturation but I want to
• 3:53 see the difference between those two. So I will adjust the blend mode to difference and now we can see just the differences between the original image and the saturation plus 100 image. This is a little confusing because the colors are all over the place. So let's simplify this by making this black and white and then we
• 4:12 can just see the intensity of the changes that are being applied. And I've added a color bar to the bottom so we can reference what colors are being impacted. So as you can see here, when the saturation is increased to 100%, the most dramatic changes are in the center of the spectrum.
• 4:29 So the greens, a little bit of cyan, a little bit of yellow have the most dramatic impact. There's also an impact to the oranges and the reds. Those are impacted when saturation is increased. But if we look over at the blues and the violets, you'll see almost no impact is being made to those colors.
• 4:49 There's very little with saturation happening there. Saturation is certainly not affecting all colors equally. It's having a bigger effect on the greens, cyan's yellows, oranges and reds, but almost no impact on the blues and the violets. Now let's do the same thing with vibrance.
• 5:07 So I've applied a vibrance plus 100 and then we've removed the color so we can just look at the difference between those. This is dramatically different when we're just looking at vibrance. What we can see here is the effect of vibrance is much more subtle. It has its greatest impact starting in the greens and working down
• 5:27 toward the cyan's, blues and violets down in the cooler end of the spectrum. It has almost no impact from the yellows, oranges and reds. There's very little impact that vibrance has on the warmer hues. Now let's talk about the negative versions of each of these values because I think that illustrates some things as well.
• 5:47 Let's start with saturation and if we reduce saturation to negative 100 and then compare that to the original saturation, now we can see actually that saturation has a more uniform effect across all of these colors. Of course when saturation is brought all the way to zero, we lose all color.
• 6:04 So it's definitely affecting all color. Mathematically, saturation might be applied equally to all colors but when we look at the positive side, the perception is that it's really impacting the warm colors. Now let's look at the vibrance at a negative. Vibrance negative to 100 and this is similar.
• 6:23 We see it be somewhat more uniform but we're definitely seeing more of an impact from the greens and then a bigger impact on the blues and the violets and less of an impact on the warmer side of the spectrum. So there's just less impact that vibrance is having on the warm tones. Now that we've seen some examples, let's look at Adobe's website
• 6:46 and see what they say about saturation and vibrance. In the color panel, use the saturation slider to adjust the color intensity of all colors in the photo. Saturation is an absolute adjustment, it affects all colors equally. Like I said, that may be true mathematically but it definitely isn't perceptually.
• 7:07 Saturation is not affecting all colors equally, it has a much greater impact on the warm hues. The vibrance slider adds saturation to a photo but it does it in a smarter way than the saturation slider. Vibrance is not an absolute adjustment, it protects already saturated colors and colors typically found in skin tones.
• 7:28 While maybe not wrong, this sounds like marketing fluff. In reality, vibrance has a greater impact on the cool tones. Vibrance is cool but I'm not sure it's smart. And since skin tones are not cool, they are protected from the vibrance adjustment. Well duh, it would be so much easier to just
• 7:47 say vibrance has a greater impact on cool hues. Quick aside for infrared photographers, if you use a color swap profile in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw, these sliders will have the opposite effect, with saturation impacting cool hues and vibrance impacting warm hues.
• 8:05 My recommendation is to use saturation to impact green and warmer hues. The impact of vibrance, while more even and subtle, is the greatest from green to cool hues. What do you think about saturation and vibrance? Is it just a matter of warm vs cool or is there more going on here?
• 8:23 Let us know in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your photography journey, like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed, thanks.