Hello and welcome back to another video, my name is Mike Davies, and in today's tutorial I'll be
showing you how to recreate the Vibrance slider found in premium software like Adobe Photoshop,
Adobe Lightroom, and Affinity Photo. By premium software I just mean you pay for it. I'll be
using GIMP version 2.10.28 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial.
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always I
have tons of video tutorials on here, plus free software help articles so definitely check that
out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy. And
you can get access to more content by becoming a premium member, and I'll include a link to this
as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video.
Alright so what is vibrance? Vibrance is basically going to be saturation, except saturation turns up
the intensity of all the colors of your image whereas the goal of vibrance is to only turn
up the saturation of all the colors besides the skin tones of an image. And usually what that
ends up boiling down to is just all of the colors in your image besides colors on the red and yellow
channels. So usually like red, orange, and yellow are not going to be turned up with the vibrance
sliders. So to start this tutorial off I'm just going to show you an extreme example here inside
of Affinity Photo. So if I were to go with the saturation slider here and turn it all the way up,
you can see what happens is the skin tones just get wrecked here, although everything
else in the image does intensify. So all the other colors in the image are more intense,
and you could always mask out this effect if you wanted to but I'm going to turn it down.
So if we go with just the vibrance slider and we turn this up, you're going to see that the colors
in the background are going to intensify without intensifying the colors of the skin tones here in
the model. So the vibrance slider can be a good way of turning up the intensity of the colors in
the background without affecting your foreground model colors, skin tones - that sort of thing.
So let's come back over here to GIMP. We have the same image opened up. And the way I'm going
to replicate this in GIMP - I'm going to come over here and just duplicate the original layer twice.
This is just for demonstration purposes, you can do this on the original layer if you want.
I'm going to rename this "Saturation" and rename this one "Vibrance." So I'm going
to start with the Vibrance technique, and to do that we're going to go to Colors>Hue-Saturation.
So because Vibrance is basically all the colors except for the skin tones, which are really going
to be the reds and yellows, at least in theory for the vibrance slider - I'm aware that not
all skin tones contain more reds and yellows or oranges. So really what we need to do is we
need to individually increase the saturation for the four other colors that are showing up here.
So I can click on green, and you'll see that's going to select just green with this little
radio button. And for the sake of demonstration I'm going to turn the saturation all the way up.
And we're just going to do that for all of the various colors here. So cyan,
blue, we're going to turn that all the way up, and magenta, we'll turn that all the way up.
So there you can see the result of that - here's a before,
here's an after. In this case you're going to see there's some harshness going on with some of the
colors because we do have everything turned all the way up. However, one way to mitigate that or
sort of blend that in is to turn the overlap up just a tiny bit, and the overlap is going to be
the same for all of the colors here. So you'll see if I click on the various colors overlap is at the
same setting. So that kind of helps blend that result. And I'm just going to come over here and
click "OK." Once again this is an extreme example because of all the colors in the background,
plus we have everything turned up to 100. But just to compare that to saturation let's
come up here to the top layer and turn this on, and now we'll go to Colors>Saturation
and if I turn this up you'll see what's gonna happen there, the skin tones will get intensified
as well. And a common term for this is "garish," the photo looks kind of garish. It just looks
really bad with the skin tones looking like that. So click OK. So although there are many uses for
the saturation slider, sometimes you just need to saturate the background without affecting the
foreground - so that's pretty much the effect. Let me demonstrate with one other photo just to show
you what this looks like with slightly different colors in the image. So I'll come over here to
this photo, and I will include links to these photos in the description of the video. Now we'll
go to Colors>Hue-Saturation, and I'm already on a layer that I created called "Vibrance,"
and we'll click on the greens, turn the saturation all the way up for the greens,
cyan, turn the saturation all the way up for that, blue, same thing, and magenta.
So here's the before, here's an after, click OK. Versus saturation - let me unhide this,
and another way to turn up the saturation in your image is to go to Colors>Hue-Saturation,
keep this set to "Master," and we can turn this all the way up.
So you can see a major difference there - I'll click OK. So here's saturation, here's vibrance,
and here's with nothing. Alright so that's it for this tutorial, hopefully you liked it. If you did
don't forget to like this video, subscribe to my channel, and click the bell icon to be notified
each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to my resources in
the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.