What is Vibrance

Dan7312

What does the vibrance setting actually do? In some cases I can see that is pushing the vibrance up moves the blue and green histogram to the left but seems to leave the red where it is, but in others I can see it moving the red and green histograms to the left and pretty much leaving the blue in place.

Sometimes the image does seem to be more vibrant but in other cases it just seems to pick up a color tinge. It seems to work best, that is make the picture more vibrant, if the white point is properly set.

So what does vibrant mean to the eye? What is it doing to the colors in the image?

Thanks

W.W. Webster

Dan7312 wrote:

What does the vibrance setting actually do?

The Lightroom help for the Vibrance slider states that this ...

Adjusts the saturation so that clipping is minimized as colors approach full saturation, changing the saturation of all lower-saturated colors with less effect on the higher-saturated colors. Vibrance also prevents skin tones from becoming over saturated.

colourbox

If Saturation clips colors too fast, you'll be able to push them further with Vibrance, before they start looking ugly. Because it holds back on the most saturated colors, you're not going to figure out a pattern by looking at an image or two because it's going to adjust different colors on every image. Depending on which ones are already near the clipping point.

BinaryFx

colourbox wrote:

If Saturation clips colors too fast, you'll be able to push them further with Vibrance, before they start looking ugly. Because it holds back on the most saturated colors, you're not going to figure out a pattern by looking at an image or two because it's going to adjust different colors on every image. Depending on which ones are already near the clipping point.

In addition to these comments from colourbox, Vibrance also has a special treatment of "skin tone hues" so that they are not over-saturated.

The issue of pushing saturation in saturated areas depends on a few different factors, more here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_safesaturation.html

Some use a "saturation mask" to help avoid clipping saturated pixels.

In CS4, the Vibrance command was added to Photoshop, rather than just being a part of ACR or Lightroom. They are not the same thing, using Vibrance in ACR is better than in Photoshop for JPEG/TIFF files.

More here:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/vibrance.html



Regards,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

colourbox

BinaryFx wrote:

In addition to these comments from colourbox, Vibrance also has a special treatment of "skin tone hues" so that they are not over-saturated.

Yup the only reason I didn't mention that was it was already covered in Webster's post.

Richard

BinaryFx wrote:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_safesaturation.html

Some use a "saturation mask" to help avoid clipping saturated pixels.

Thanks a ton for that link, Stephen. I have often wanted a saturation mask but never knew how to make one. I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

BinaryFx

colourbox wrote:

Yup the only reason I didn't mention that was it was already covered in Webster's post.

Oops, I missed that, cheers!


Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

BinaryFx

Richard wrote:

Thanks a ton for that link, Stephen. I have often wanted a saturation mask but never knew how to make one. I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

Many folk use the HSB filter to create a S channel, which is mentioned in the article (HSB filter on the Adobe optional installs section of the install disk or a third party plug-in).

The "Saturation Mask" action uses a "difference mask", which is the difference between a desaturated and a regular colour image (using native Photoshop features, without the need for installing a plug-in). Difference masks can be very useful in many different situations!


Regards,

Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

Dan7312

Thanks for the replies and the link