


Today’s Question: In my early days of using Photoshop, I would use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to boost saturation. Since the addition of the Vibrance adjustment layer, I’ve been using that exclusively to adjust saturation. With the availability of Vibrance is there any need to use Hue/Saturation?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The Vibrance adjustment layer in Photoshop is preferred for saturation changes compared to the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. The primary reason you would use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer is to apply a color adjustment to a specific color range within the image, such as to refine the appearance of only blue areas of a photo.
More Detail: The Vibrance adjustment is newer than Hue/Saturation and includes both a Vibrance slider and a Saturation slider. The Vibrance slider is generally the best starting point for refining saturation for an image, as it helps prevent having highly saturated colors from getting over-saturated, and it helps protect skin tones from too strong an adjustment.
With the availability of the Vibrance adjustment, I don’t recommend using Hue/Saturation for adjusting overall saturation in an image. However, Hue/Saturation can still be tremendously helpful for targeted color adjustments.
With Hue/Saturation you can choose a specific color range by clicking on one of the round color swatches below the Preset popup. You can then adjust the sliders for Hue (overall color value), Saturation (color purity or intensity), and Luminance (color brightness). You can apply different adjustments for each of the available color swatches.
In addition, you can customize the color range represented by the color swatches, such as to broadening the range for the cyan color swatch to include blue colors in addition to cyan. After selecting a color swatch, you can adjust the color range using the controls between the gradients at the bottom of the set of controls for Hue/Saturation.