Adobe Tutorial #3

When I was going through trying to find a tutorial to do, I decided to check out one on using the Vibrance slider.


I've recently become a pretty big fan of bright, saturated colors in photos, so I thought this would be an interesting video to watch. It's less of a tutorial and more of an explanation of what the Vibrance adjustment does (as opposed to the Saturation adjustment) and when to use it.

Here's a link to the video: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cs5/saturating-selectively-with-vibrance/

This is my example photo with no adjustments added:

The photo doesn't look bad as is, but it would be nice to brighten up the purple of the sweatshirt and the orange of the kitten to emphasize the contrast of the colors.

The first thing showed in the video is the effect of the Saturation adjustment. Here's what a photo looks like with the Saturation level all the way up (100):

This is obviously a very dramatic look, but I've done that to show how harshly the saturation change appears. Even at low levels, the skin tones of the subject appear too orange/red. The purple looks pretty good here. We could go in and mask out the skin areas, leaving the purple saturated, but the contrast between the old image and the new adjustment would look a bit odd.

Instead, we can adjust the vibrance on the image. Here's what the photo looks like with the Saturation at 0 and the Vibrance at 100. I've also shown the original (top right) and the saturated (bottom right), so you can easily compare the different settings to one another.

The brightening of colors here is much more appealing. We can still see the purple sweatshirt is close to that of the overly saturated image, and we have warmer colors in the skin and the kitten, without over-doing it.

So, the Vibrance adjustment, used in place of the Saturation adjustment, or alongside it, can provide nice, bright colors in an image, without the harsh effects on skin tones. Try it for yourself!