Adding Saturation and Vibrance in Adobe Lightroom

Hi everyone I'm professional nature photographer Ian Plant. And you've probably noticed that your digital raw files don't have a lot of color intensity in fact they probably look pretty dull compared to the way the scene looked with your own eyes. Don't worry raw files are designed to look that way and I'm gonna show you an easy way to restore color intensity to your photos and give your images some extra pop. Most image editing programs have a few tools that will allow you to increase the color intensity of your photos. I'm gonna show you a few of those tools in Adobe Lightroom, which is a really popular image processing program.

If you're not using light room don't worry. I'm sure that your program has tools that are very similar to what I'm gonna show you here today. One way to enhance the color intensity of your photos is to use the saturation slider. What the saturation slider does is it increases the color intensity of all of the colors in your photo equally. If you're not careful you can end up over saturating colors that are already intense, which results in a loss of critical detail and unrealistic looking photos.

Another option is to use the vibrance tool. Vibrance works differently than the saturation slider, and it doesn't increase color saturation equally for all colors. Rather it is designed to increase the intensity of only the less saturated colors in the image. And it has little or no effect on colors that are already highly saturated to begin with. The vibrance is especially useful for working with for example a photo with a brilliant sunset sky.

The vibrance tool allows you to give the weaker colors in the image some extra pop without pushing the more extreme colors over the limit. Although vibrance is designed to make more subtle color intensity adjustments and saturation. If you push the slider too far to the right, you can start to get very unrealistic results. So as with most things in light room, usually less is more. I typically make only small adjustments to vibrance, reserving more aggressive adjustments for photos that don't have a lot of color and that need a little extra help.

So saturation is more aggressive and I typically only use it for photos that don't have a lot of native color vibrance is more gentle and it's perfect for photos that already have a lot of intense colors. And sometimes a mix of the two sliders is exactly what you need just don't overdo it. And your photos are gonna look so much better. I'm Ian Plant and thanks for watching.