the difference between Saturation and Vibrance.
These tools allow you to add saturation to an image,
but they do it in very different ways.
So what's the difference?
How do they work behind the scenes?
We're going to answer these questions and more in this video.
So make sure that you stick around into the very end,
because I'm going to talk about things that almost nobody is talking about.
All right! Let's jump right into the tutorial.
This is the image that I'm going to work with. And I have
these gradients and these boxes that we're going to hide for now,
but we're going to come back to them in a moment.
So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to answer the question,
what is the difference between saturation and Vibrance?
So I'll start by creating a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer
and you will see the saturation slider here.
And I'm just going to click and drag the saturation all the way to the right.
Saturation increases the intensity of colors in an image.
So when you drag the saturation slider to the right,
you're going to increase the intensity of all colors equally.
This is why you see a lot of issues.
You see her skin tones looking unrealistic.
If I zoom in onto her top, you'll see a lot of banding.
So there is definitely a lot of problems going on here.
So the saturation slider may not be
the best option for increasing saturation on a photo
I'll reset the slider by clicking on the reset button
and I'll disable it next.
I'll create a Vibrance Adjustment Layer
and vibrance is a smarter way of adding saturation.
I'm going to click the Vibrance slider all the way to the right
and notice
how now the colors are not blown out.
You can see that her skin tones are OK.
The colors that were already saturated,
do not have much more saturation than they did originally.
That's because vibrance protects skin tones and already saturated pixels.
So in this case, notice that the shirt, even though it was already highly
saturated, we're not getting the banding that we were getting earlier.
And to be frank with you,
Vibrance at 100 is still too much.
For something like this, maybe a Vibrance of about 75 will be OK.
You will still get the saturation required for the image to look good without blowing any pixels out.
With the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer that's definitely not the case.
Also, I want you to notice something with the Vibrance Adjustment Layer;
so I'll enable that.
I'll reset it and I'll enable the color gradients
and actually, I'll place this group below the Adjustment Layer so
that the Adjustment Layers affect the gradients in this group.
And I'm going to go into a Window and make sure that the Info Panel is enabled.
And when I hover over the image, you can see the HSB values here,
if you don't see them, click on this icon and make sure that you select HSB.
So just in case you don't know what this means.
Let me show you, I'm going to double click
on the foreground color to bring up the color picker.
And from here you have several different ways of selecting color.
You have the HSB color mode,
the LAB mode, the RGB mode, the CMYK mode and the hex code input box.
We're mainly going to focus on HSB here.
H stands for Hue.
In other words, what color we're dealing with.
is it red, magenta, blue, green, yellow, orange.
What color are we talking about?
Then we have Saturation.
How intense is that color?
Is it at its maximum intensity?
or is it at 0 % intensity; which makes it gray.
And then we have B for Brightness,
how bright that color is or how dark that color is.
So Hue, Saturation and Brightness.
I'm going to cancel this.
And when I hover over the image,
you'll see the HSB values here in the info panel.
So notice that the saturation is at 100%,
the Brightness is at 100%.
And the only thing that changes among all these different colors is the hue.
So what color we're referring to.
And with this gradient, we have the same thing,
the only difference is that saturation is much lower than in this gradient.
And then we have these boxes as they're
all red, but they just have different levels of saturation.
So, watch what happens when I increase the vibrance.
I'm just going to drag it to the right.
Notice that the gradient in the center didn't change at all,
the gradient on the right did change and look at the change.
Notice how Photoshop protected the reds and oranges here.
And that's because that's where you find the skin tones.
But it didn't protect the blues and cyans and magentas here.
See that?
Also, notice that this block here really didn't get that much of an increase
because this block already had a lot of saturation,
the two blocks below didn't have that much saturation,
so they were affected more.
See that?
So that's how this Adjustment Layer works.
I'm going to reset it and now I'm going
to talk about something that's very important.
Notice how both Adjustment Layer also have a Saturations slider.
See that?
And in the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer,
you already saw it. And it's right here.
Let's work with the hue and saturation slider first.
And right off the bat,
I'm going to tell you that just because both Adjustment Layers have a slider
with the same name doesn't mean that they do the same thing.
They work very differently.
And that's what I'm going to talk about next.
So I want to ask you a question.
What do you think will happen if I bring the saturation down?
What do you think will happen with these gradients and these blocks?
Remember, in this center gradient, the only thing that changes is the hue.
The saturation and brightness are the same
I'll enable the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer.
Then I'll drag the saturation slider all the way to the left
and notice how all these grays now look the same.
And the reason being is
that the brightness is the same all across the board,
but the saturation changes.
So when I decrease the saturation
Photoshop just keeps the gray.
The Hue doesn't matter because there is no saturation.
So Photoshop is just looking at the lightness of the image.
So watch what happens now
when I do the same thing with the Vibrance Adjustment Layer
the settings are all default.
Everything is set to 0. Vibrance and Saturation.
and I'll drag the saturation slider to the left
and notice now that we get a completely different result.
And that's because the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer
is using the HSL Color Mode,
the hue, saturation, lightness, color mode.
And the Vibrance Adjustment Layer is using the
HSB
hue, saturation and brightness, color mode.
HSL is represented more mathematically, so to speak.
And what I mean by that is if you have a color and you remove the saturation
HSL will make it a shade of gray. And the shade of gray that it makes it
depends on the brightness of that particular color.
However, HSB uses a system that is based on the human eye perception of brightness.
So let me show you what I mean by that.
Let me disable this Adjustment Layer.
And again, we already know that all these
different colors have the same saturation and the same brightness.
Right?
But to the human eye, blue always looks darker than yellow.
Even if they have the same brightness
to our eyes, blue would just look darker.
It just feels that way.
But if you just look at the numbers,
they have the same brightness and same saturation.
So what HSB is doing
is using a visual representation of brightness
based on the human eye.
So Blue will look a darker shade of gray
than yellow when we make it black and white.
So when I select the Vibrance Adjustment Layer here
and I bring down the saturation
notice that blue looks so much darker than yellow,
but in reality they have the same brightness.
So that's the difference between vibrance and saturation
and the difference between