Saturation vs. Vibrance. What’s the Difference for Video?

Apple Final Cut Pro provides saturation control in the Color Inspector and a Vibrancy effect in the Effects panel.

The Lumetri Color panel in Adobe Premiere Pro includes color adjustments for both saturation and vibrance.

What’s the difference between these and which should you use?

• Saturation increases or decreases all the colors in an image equally.
• Vibrance increases or decreases some of the colors in an image. It is sometimes called “smart saturation.”

At the risk of starting yet more flame wars, here are three general guidelines:

• If you want to decrease the colors in an image, use saturation.
• If you want to increase all the colors in an image, use saturation, but VERY gently! Smaller increases of saturation are better.
• If you want to increase the colors in an image, and preserve skin tones, use vibrance.

Here are some examples.

Here is a test strip of colors created in Photoshop. The top image is the original, the middle image is with saturation fully off, the bottom is with vibrance fully off.

As you can see, saturation fully removes all colors evenly. Vibrance removes more blues, greens and reds. It is impossible to remove all colors using vibrance.

In general, you should not use vibrance to remove colors.

Original (left), 100% saturation (middle), 100% vibrance (right). Click to see larger image.

The value of using vibrance appears as you boost colors to make them more eye-popping when there are people in the shot.

With the overly saturated image, notice how skin tones are too intense and artificial; like a can of spray tan gone wild.

Vibrance enhances colors, without significantly boosting skin tones. Yes, these settings are too high, but, even too high, vibrance still looks “pretty good.”

Original (left), 60% saturation (middle), 60% vibrance (right). Click to see larger image.

Here’s a more realistic example, where neither saturation nor vibrance are cranked full.

Both saturation and vibrance boosts the colors in the flower and food. But, see how the skin tones are controlled with vibrance but way too excessive with saturation.

SUMMARY

Original (left), 60% desaturation (right). Click to see larger image.

In general, we can desaturate images any amount without problems. But boosting color can very quickly lead to unpleasant results.

• Use saturation to desaturate images.
• When you need to increase the amount of color, use very small amounts of saturation. Try not to increase saturation more than 20% to prevent images looking artificial.
• Once people are in the shot, you’ll get much more pleasing results using small to medium amounts of vibrance. You can use about twice as much vibrance, compared to saturation, without the quality of an image becoming surreal.