A little color saturation goes a long way.
Small shifts in saturation can have big effects on your photos. Learn how to make changes in post-processing to get the look you want.
What is saturation?
Artists and photographers use hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL) to describe color. Hue refers to the dominant wavelength of light that the human eye interprets as color, but you can think of it as the basic color on the color wheel. Saturation describes the intensity of the color. And lightness refers to how light or dark the color is.
A grayscale or black-and-white photo has no color saturation, while a full-color photo of a field of sunlit wildflowers might be extremely saturated. Some photos are naturally more saturated than others, but how much you decide to add depends on your subject and your intention.
Check your histogram.
Histograms are graphs that show you the tonal range of an image, from shadows to midtones to highlights. Their most common use is for exposure and tonality, but you can also find a color histogram in your digital camera or in your photo editing software.
Look for points on the graph where your color values spike off the chart. This is called clipping, and it means the camera sensor was overloaded, so you’ve lost detail for those pixels. If you desaturate a little, you might regain some of that detail.
Adjust color saturation in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Change the intensity of color in your photos using the color editing tools in Lightroom.