Color saturation refers to the intensity of color in an image. Along with hue and lightness, photographers can use image saturation to bring intense vibrancy and even a surreal feel to photos. Here, you’ll find our complete guide to color saturation in photography.
In this article, we’ll delve into:
Read on to discover more about the intense and colorful world of photo saturation, and bring your images to life!
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What Is Color Saturation?
What does color saturation mean? Color saturation is the measure of intensity in an image, defined as the degree to which it differs from white. In a heavily saturated photo, colors will appear more brilliant and pure, creating a brightly colored result.
In an undersaturated photo, the colors will move closer to white, creating a more muted effect.
Color saturation is the measure of intensity in an image, defined as the degree to which it differs from white.
Color vs Hue vs Saturation vs Lightness
It’s important to distinguish between color, hue, color saturation, and lightness, as these four factors have different effects on a color photo. Photographers can combine these color adjustments to create a certain effect in an image.
What is hue vs saturation vs color? These three factors impact how color appears in an image, including how bright and vivid colors appear. Hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL) are brought together to describe how color is manipulated and adjusted in a photograph.
What Is Color in Photography?
All photographs are generated through the filtering of colored light through the lens of a camera, primarily red, blue, and green light. This three-color method was first theorized by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in an 1855 paper, with the first color photograph produced by Thomas Sutton for one of Maxwell’s lectures in 1861.
At its most basic, we can interpret color as representing pigment in photography, which is perceivable to the human eye as a full spectrum of visible colors.
What Is Hue in Photography?
Hue in photography refers to the pure color, or the visible spectrum of colors, like those seen in a rainbow. Hues are a combination of the three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—and the three secondary colors—orange, green, and violet—that appear on the color wheel.
When hues are combined with color saturation, chroma, or intensity, the resulting ‘blend’ is referred to as the color’s chromaticity.
What Is Saturation in Photography?
Color saturation in photography is the measure of color intensity and purity in an image. Imagine seeing the most ‘red’ red you have ever looked at—a highly saturated photo of a red object can almost hurt your eyes with the sheer intensity of the color!
Because very high saturation is rarely seen in real life, saturated color photography can appear artificial to the human eye. While this is useful when creating surreal imagery, very high color saturation can lend images a ‘fake’ look that appears unnatural.
Read on to discover tips for using color saturation in moderation, as well as how to manipulate the mood of your imagery with photo saturation.
What Is Lightness in Photography?
Lightness in photography refers to how light or dark a color is. Lightness is manipulated by adding or subtracting white from the hue, with 0% lightness appearing as black and 100% lightness appearing as white.
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What Is the HSV Scale?
The HSV Scale, which stands for Hue, Saturation, and Value, is a color model that describes colors in terms of their shade and brightness. It can sometimes also be called HSB, with ‘B’ standing for Brightness.
The HSV Scale can be used to select precise colors for digital images, color swatches, and graphics. Photographers often use the HSV scale in place of the RGB color model as HSV corresponds more accurately to how people actually perceive and experience color.
Let’s look at the three color qualities that contribute to the HSV Scale.
Hue
The HSV Scale presents each color quality—hue, saturation, and value—as a numerical quantity. Hue is measured in degrees from 0 to 360, with cyan falling between 181–240 degrees, and magenta between 301–360 degrees. Hue refers to the degree of pure color visible in an image, as part of the visible color spectrum.
Saturation
Saturation is the second color quality that contributes to the HSV Scale, and is measured on a scale of 0 to 100%, with a 100% value being the highest possible level of saturation. As we looked at earlier, saturation is a measure of color intensity in an image.
Value
As with saturation, value is also measured on a scale of 0 to 100%. Value measures the brightness of an image, where 0 is the darkest and 100 is the brightest, revealing the most color possible. Value is adjusted closely in combination with saturation to create the desired color result in a photo.
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How to Adjust Image Saturation
Adjusting image saturation can be a fine art, as making even small alterations to saturated color photography can make a huge difference in the look, style, and mood of your images.
Here, you’ll find a helpful guide for how to adjust color saturation before you take an image and in post-processing, as well as tips for working with film stock and in development.
Camera Settings
If you have a good idea of the level of color saturation you want to achieve in your image before shooting, you can adjust your camera settings to achieve just the right level of image saturation.
To create more vivid, intense colors in your images, you will need to set the saturation to a higher level. In a Canon camera, this can usually be edited from Picture Style Setting, while a Nikon camera will have this option in Picture Control Setting.
Either move the slider to a higher value, or choose from a range of pre-loaded saturation options, which might include Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape.
As the name suggests, Vivid will increase the saturation level quite dramatically, but a setting like Landscape will also include some increased saturation to bring out more vibrant colors in your photos.
Digital Editing
Working ideally from a RAW file, you can use an app like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop to directly adjust saturation in photography. In Photoshop, go to Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation, to directly edit the color saturation and hue in photography.
In combination with Levels (click the Levels icon in the Adjustments panel, or choose Levels from the panel menu), which determines the tonal range and color balance in your image, you can tweak both this and the Hue/Saturation levels until you’re happy with the result.
Keep in mind that images on the screen will likely appear brighter than a printed photo, so you will need to either use a calibration tool for your monitor or apply slightly more saturation in Photoshop than you’re looking to achieve in print.
Film Stock
When shooting with film stock, you can select a type of stock that will boost or desaturate the colors in the images you shoot. While this isn’t essential, as you can adjust color saturation in post production, it’s a great way to bring vibrancy into your images, if that’s the style you know you want to achieve.
Try Kodak Ektar 100, Fujifilm Velvia 50, or Kodak Gold for intense, vibrant colors in your film photos.
You can also use camera filters at the point of image capture to increase or decrease saturation, as well as to boost the vibrancy of particular colors, if say you want to highlight a subject dressed in a vibrant color like red or yellow.
Development
Unless you have a very sophisticated photo lab at hand, it can be tricky to pinpointedly adjust color saturation in darkroom development. One thing you can certainly do to improve the output of color is to choose a particular photo paper to print your final images.
Metallic paper often gives a vibrant effect to photos due to the level of shine and shimmer in the paper stock, while Epson Exhibition Fiber paper lends photos a serious saturation boost.
How Does Saturation Affect Photos?
Saturation in photography is a fantastic technique for bringing more vibrancy and life to your images. Imagine switching the weather from a dull, cloudy day to a sunlit summer afternoon.
In this sense, saturation also has the power to transform the mood of your photos, and is often used as a technique for making images feel more optimistic and energized.
Saturated color photography has to be executed with discipline and moderation, as excessive saturation or undersaturation can impact the quality of your images.
Let’s take a look at the effects color saturation can have on your photography, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Oversaturation
Oversaturated images feature very high saturation and high value color, resulting in extremely vivid and bright images. High color saturation can lend images an artificial quality, which works well when editing surreal photos or when you want to replicate the Technicolor look of vintage, 1950s-style images.
A moderately high color saturation can make images feel cheerful and inviting, like giving your photos a serious dopamine hit!
Oversaturation in your photos should be avoided as much as possible, as a slight tweak can take an image from optimistic to unnatural in an instant. Because high color saturation is rare in the real world, we often perceive oversaturated images as being fake or ‘off’ in some way.
Consider the stress of the human eye when looking at extremely bright, vivid colors—photos featuring heavy color saturation can sometimes feel even painful to look at!
Extremely oversaturated photos will also feature areas of color bleeding, with any high value color appearing to ‘bleed’ into neighboring parts of the image. Avoid this!
Undersaturation
By contrast, undersaturated color photography appears far more muted, and in different contexts can feel lethargic, moody or nostalgic. A common technique used in TV and movies is to desaturate shots that are taking the viewer back in time, to give the sense that real life is in full color while the past is only rendered through memory.
A little undersaturation can bring a subdued elegance to images, without resorting to the old-fashioned drama of black and white photography. You can also dial down the value on the HSV Scale to make an image appear a little darker, to mimic the look of shadows, a dark interior, or nighttime in an otherwise bright photo.
Color saturation that is too low will make an image appear washed-out and dark, and can impact on the visibility of details in your image, so try to only use undersaturation in moderation.
Conclusion: Choose a Vibrant Life with Color Saturation
The invention of color photography transformed the way people engaged with photography, and it’s no surprise that super-saturated imagery became so desirable in photography and film in the 1950s and ’60s. It must have been like suddenly switching on the lights!
While hyper-saturated color photography may have fallen out of favor over subsequent decades, it’s certainly making a stylish comeback today. Contemporary photographers like Jamie Hawkesworth are rediscovering the nostalgic and beautiful impact that color saturation can have in photography, injecting everyday scenes or high-fashion photography with an equal dose of dopamine-boosting color saturation.
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