# Why Saturation is BETTER Than Vibrance!

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** PiXimperfect
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg
- **Дата:** 10.02.2026
- **Длительность:** 14:40
- **Просмотры:** 64,043

## Описание

Why is Saturation often seen as harsh while Vibrance is praised as the smarter choice in Photoshop, and what if that assumption isn't always true?
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In this video, we take a practical, real-world look at Saturation vs. Vibrance in Photoshop, breaking down how each adjustment actually works and why Saturation can often give you better control, stronger separation, and more impactful color when used the right way. You'll see clear examples where Vibrance holds colors back too much, how Saturation behaves like a true color enhancer, and how combining Saturation with a powerful Saturation Mask can give you the best of both worlds without crushing tones. I'll also walk you through a simple technique and share a free Photoshop action to help you apply this workflow effortlessly to your own photos. The goal isn't to declare one tool right or wrong, but to help you understand when Saturation truly shines, when Vibrance makes more sense, and how to choose confidently based on the image in front of you. I hope this video helps you. Thank you so much for watching :)

► TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:32 Actual Difference Between Vibrance and Saturation
02:57 Adding Mild Color Boost
04:38 Using Saturation Mask
08:26 Create Separation with Saturation
10:59 Where Vibrance Shines
12:36 Three Takeaways

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg) Intro

Of all the times you have played with color, how many times have you increased or decreased saturation versus played with vibrance? If you ask me, it's saturation all the way most of the time. Now, I do hear that vibrance is better. It's more gentle. But today, I'm going to share with you a couple examples where saturation can be much better, way better than vibrance. However, vibrance may have its place. And also, at the end of the video, I'm going to share with you a trick to make saturation even better. I have an action for you as well. So without any further ado, let's get started. Let's take a

### [0:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=32s) Actual Difference Between Vibrance and Saturation

look at this chart. And again, to make it easy, you don't have to even consider all of these values and numbers. Don't worry about the details. Just take a look at these two things. First, I'm going to try to increase the saturation here by clicking on the adjustment layer icon and then choosing hue saturation. Now, inside of hue saturation, as you do increase the saturation, you would notice one thing. It boosts the colors of everything irrespective of how much color there is in that particular area. Think of saturation like a volume knob for every pixel. It will boost the colors of everything equally. Now, let's compare this with vibrance. In the latest versions of Photoshop, vibrance has been changed to color and vibrance. It's an updated adjustment layer. If you're using an older version of Photoshop, you can simply pick the vibrance adjustment. Click there. Keep in mind the saturation there is slightly different from hue saturation. We're not going to focus onto that. Now, if you increase vibrance, you would notice that it's massively different. Now, we learned that saturation is like a volume knob for every single pixel where it boosts the color of every pixel irrespective of what they are. It looks at it equally, linearly, mathematically. Whereas increasing the vibrance is like playing with the equalizer, correcting different tones, correcting different wavelengths just to make sure that we boost the colors in a way that it's gentle. And to share with you the difference, here is the vibrance and here is the saturation. And as you can notice, saturation is way harsh than vibrance. It's more gentle in all of these areas. Now just to recap, saturation is like the volume knob for every single pixel. It increases or decreases the volume of colors in each pixel whether they have less color, more brightness, less brightness, it doesn't look at any one of those values. Whereas playing with vibrance is like playing with a musical equalizer. If you do want to hear the music more and you do increase the intensity, if the system feels that the bass is less, it will increase the bass first. it will do everything in its power just to make sure that the increase or decrease in sound is gentle without making anything harsh. And the same is happening with colors when you work with vibrance versus saturation. So on paper

### [2:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=177s) Adding Mild Color Boost

saturation sounds worse and vibrance much better because vibrance is smarter. However, sometimes in life you need dumb tools that do exactly what you want. Let me share with you an example here. In this case, all I want to do is to boost the colors throughout. I don't want it to be that smart. So, if I were to add a hue saturation adjustment by clicking on the adjustment layer icon and then choosing hue saturation. And if I just increase the saturation, this boosts everything equally. A little bit of the skin tones, her jeans, a little bit of colors in the background, and looks perfect to me. Here's the before. Here's the after. However, if you were to add vibrance, let's see what happens. I'm going to turn this off again. I'm going to create a vibrance adjustment layer. And this time, let's increase the vibrance. Now, as I do increase it to even 21, it has not touched the skin tone, which can be a good thing in many cases. But I did want a little bit of the boost. So, I would have to increase it a lot, possibly to this point at 66. Now the skin is exactly where I want it to be. But the problem is it has also modified the genes way too much more than I wanted. So let's take a look. Here's the hue saturation. Little bit of boost to everything. Before. After. And here's the color and vibrance where the boost is unequal. It's playing with an equalizer. There you go. This has been modified too much which I didn't want. And if I wanted a little modification there, it's not boosting the skin tones

### [4:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=278s) Using Saturation Mask

as much. Now, in cases like this where you do want the boost equally, saturation makes way more sense. But what about situations where you do want to make the colors pop? Use saturation, but also not crush the colors in certain areas. I have a technique for you. Let's take a look at this example. If you were to directly apply a hue saturation adjustment and increase the saturation, let me bring it right over there. You would notice that this looks great, but the blues in the sky and the mountains are amplified way too much and it doesn't look nice anymore. What if we only increased the saturation in areas that had more color? We can easily do that with a saturation mask. Stay till the end of the video. I'm going to share with you an action for it. All you need to do first is to open your photo, make a copy of the layer that you want to boost the saturation of. Press control or commandJ to make a duplicate. Then simply go to filter other HSB HSL. These settings are fine and hit okay. Now I know this looks crap but trust me on this. Trust the process. If you go to channels, you'll find that this image has been separated in three parts. This channel, this one, and this one. And all of these are masks that stand for different things. If you chose hue, saturation, lightness, this is the mask for hue which shows different values of hue. This is the mask for saturation and this is the mask for lightness. Without going more into the details, let us focus on the saturation mask. The areas that are darker have less color in them and the areas that are brighter have more color in them. And we can use this to our advantage. So to create a mask out of this, hold the control or command and click on the thumbnail of this layer. Now you can select the RGB back, come back to layers and even delete this layer. Let's drag it and drop it to the trash can. With that selection still active, let us create a hue saturation adjustment layer. Now it will come with that exact mask. Now inside of it, if you do increase the saturation, now have a look how nice this looks. I'm going to keep it at about 48%. Here's the before and here's the after. That's such a wonderful boost. If you were to compare this with vibrance, let's see what it does. Click on the adjustment layer icon and then choose color and vibrance. And let's increase the vibrance. It doesn't add that pop as it did in the previous diagram. It even darkens some of the colors. If you compare it with this version of hue saturation, see the amount of pop it adds. And if you want it more, you can even increase it even more slightly. So now you know the difference in real world photos. While hue saturation makes everything pop. Like here's the before. Here's the after. Look at the land. Areas where we needed the pop. saturation. It adds that there. While with vibrance, it just tries to keep everything gentle and even boosts the colors in these areas where we didn't want. It doesn't create the amount of separation that hue saturation does. So, diagrams are different. Real life applications are different. Now, you might ask, what if you use that same saturation mask with vibrance? Let us try it. Try everything. Don't listen to just opinions. Try it yourself. Try it on your photos. Let's turn off this layer. Hold the Alt key or the option key. Click and drag and drop this mask right there with vibrance as well. Let's turn on the vibrance. Does it make it better? Yes, it does make it better, but it doesn't have the punch that hue saturation have, especially with these areas. Both are different. You might like the vibrance more, but I leave that decision to you. Speaking of separation

### [8:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=506s) Create Separation with Saturation

let me share with you another example. In this case, if we were to add vibrance, let's see what happens. Color and vibrance. And let's increase the vibrance. The color is being boosted, but the tiger is getting less and less separated. It's adding all of that yellow in the background, too much here in the green, also color on the tiger. It's just not creating that separation that we needed. So, let's increase it more so that we can see the difference. Now, let's turn it off. And this time, let us try the hue saturation with the saturation mask that we talked about previously. But instead of having to do all the process, I have created an action for you that you can download absolutely for free. Check the link in the description to download the action. Once you do download the action, simply go to window actions and you will find the action pix saturation mask. If you want to learn how to load actions, simply click on the hamburger menu or the tofu burger menu of your vegetarian and then click on load actions and just simply locate the action and load it. Once you load it, it should show up right there. You want to make sure that the background or the layer that you want to boost the saturation of is selected. Then open this up and select the saturation mask and simply play that action. It will automatically create that mask for you that we created in the previous example. Now simply open up the properties by double clicking on the symbol of the adjustment layer and let's increase the saturation. Now you would notice this creates a kind of separation that was lacking with just vibrance. Let me share with you the difference. Let's create a history state for this section. It's called a snapshot. And let's also create a snapshot with this one. And now let's have a look at the difference between both. Here is the one with hue saturation. Look at how the tiger is separated and the background yellows are not enhanced too much. The grass has less green here. Everything is just equally gently boosted, which might be nice, but it's not separating the tiger. Here's the hue saturation where the tiger is separated. Not too much green so that the attention goes to the grass. Not too much yellow in the background branches. And here is this one where everything is gently boosted. Each have their own application. But I feel in this case this is better in terms of creating that separation. I can increase it even more to boost it even more and create a much better separation for this

### [10:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=659s) Where Vibrance Shines

particular photo. But, you know, there could be times where the aesthetic of vibrance is better than saturation, especially when you don't have a lot of different colors. Let's take a look at this example here. I'm going to create another vibrance layer and increase the vibrance. And overall, this just pops out and looks so lush. Whereas, if I were to use the same hue saturation with separation here, let's see what it does. So with the saturation mask, I'm just going to play that action. Go back to the settings and try to increase the saturation. Now the way saturation works is that it adds a bit of pop, which may work in some image, which may work against you in some photos. In this case, it's adding that pop right there, which may or may not be what you want. Now, let's compare both. Here's the hue saturation, and here is the vibrance. It is more lush. Let's take a look. But the one thing with hue saturation is that it's not adding too much saturation to the road. Whereas with vibrance, it's making it blue. And if you increase it even more, it's just making it bluish while everything else is lush. What you can try doing is that using that mask that we created. Let's paste that mask right there. Let's see if that fixes that. Yes, it does fixes that. Does fix that. And then you can increase the vibrance even more. So, best of both worlds. Here's how to make it lush. And if you feel you need more, make a duplicate of this layer by pressing control or command J. And this is just incredible color boost. Before, after.

### [12:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLF63EPjfwg&t=756s) Three Takeaways

So, three things for you to keep in mind. Saturation is like the volume knob for every single pixel. And it will boost the colors of every pixel irrespective of who they are, what they did, like the Backstreet Boys song. Whereas, vibrance is like playing with a smart musical equalizer. If you enhance or increase the intensity, if it thinks the bass is low, it will increase the bass without making the treble harsher. Secondly, saturation is really good at adding separation pop. And if you combine it with a saturation mask, it just enhances its ability way too much. Do not forget to download the action. Whereas vibrance gently boosts the colors all throughout the image without making anything harsher. And finally, just remember that these are just an opinion of an artist like me to an artist like you. I might like blue, you might like red or vice versa. And that is perfectly fine. As artists, we have our own tastes, preferences, and choices. And you have your own. And that's just makes us unique. Your choices might be absolutely different from my artistic choices. And that's what makes our art unique. It's absolutely fine if vibrance works better for you. It's incredibly fine if it works better for your images and makes it more aesthetically pleasing. At the end of the day, what matters is that you understand how differently these work and then make your own choice as to what is best for your image at that particular situation. I hope this video helped you and if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe, ring the bell so that you my friend don't miss any other future tips, tricks or tutorials. — Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in my next one. Till then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/17724*