Color Saturation in Lightroom

On three techniques for saturating color in Lightroom.

Last night we had a beautiful sunset.  The sky was baby blue, the clouds were pink and the horizon was golden.  I couldn’t resist.  So I grabbed my Canon PowerShot G11 and walked over to the neighbor’s front yard where the view is just a bit better.  I composed what I thought was an interesting image and snapped a few.

This morning I uploaded them and got to wondering about color saturation in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  I have a technique I’ve used for years to enhance colors but there are a couple of other techniques I thought I’d like to understand better.  The three Lightroom controls are:

  • Saturation
  • Vibrance
  • HSL (the control I use the most)

So, for starters, here’s the original unadjusted image.

sunset_original As you can see, the colors are really quite nice.  But my recollection of the sunset was that they were a little more saturated, more intense.

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