Saturation and Vibrance. What’s the Difference?

The saturation slider has been present in almost any editing software since the early days of digital images. The vibrance slider is by no means a recent addition to the toolkit of image editing, but there is still some confusion about the difference between the two tools.

What do saturation and vibrance have in common?

Before we’ll look at the differences let’s first see what both tools generally do. Both tools  increase or decrease the purity of a color. If for instance the saturation is increased, all colors are shifted towards the pure primary colors. In the screenshot below the RGB values of the original blue tones (left column) have changed from 78/119/185 to 8/103/255 (right column). In other words, the blue (B) value has reached its maximum value of 255 while the the red (R) and green (G) values are lower than before. This happens to all the primary colors when the saturation is increased, i.e. for red tones the R Value would increase while the G and B values would decrease and so on.

As the saturation is reduced, the RGB values become gradually more similar.

The differences

The saturation tool increase all color values be a fixed amount, no matter how saturated the colors where in the first place. This means that already highly saturated colors will be saturated even more which can result in very unrealistic colors. The vibrance tool on the other hand increases already highly saturated colors only minimally while the saturation of colors with low saturation are increased by a larger amount.

The following two images show the difference:

Maximum color saturation

Maximum vibrance

The different behaviour of the two tools is even more noticeable when the color saturation or the vibrance is reduced. When the saturation slider is set to -100 the image becomes black and white. If the vibrance slider is set to -100 there is still some color left. Again the pictures below show the difference:

Minimum saturation

Minimum vibrance

My personal favorite …

… is the vibrance tool. For my taste it leads to more natural results than the saturation tool.