Adjust saturation and vibrance

Vibrance and Saturation are the two quick color-strength controls. They are at the end of General › Basic Color, below the white balance sliders, and both run from -100 to +100.

Control	What it does
Saturation	Scales the color of every pixel the same way. -100 turns the photo gray. +100 doubles the color.
Vibrance	Raises color mostly in muted areas and leaves strong colors alone, so colors that are already vivid don’t go too far. Negative values calm the muted colors.

Start with Vibrance when a photo looks flat. Use Saturation for a uniform change, or to mute a whole photo.

To change only one color, such as the blue of a sky, use Color Adjust. For black and white, use the Monochrome switch described under effects.

Note

Like the rest of General, these apply to the active layer. A local layer applies its own values on top of the Base layer’s result. See Layers.

Technical details: how the two differ

Both work on the color strength (the saturation in HLS) of each pixel in linear light. Saturation multiplies it by 1 plus its setting divided by 100. Vibrance adds a share of the room a pixel has left before it is fully saturated, so a muted pixel gains more than a vivid one. Pixels brighter than white are handled on their color divided by their brightest channel, so highlights keep their headroom.

These two run last in a layer’s chain of adjustments, after the effects.