Saturation

Once you're happy with the color tones of your photo, you can increase or decrease their intensity with the Saturation slider.

When you increase the saturation of a photo's colors, you make them more vivid; essentially, you make them "pop" more. You can also improve photos that have harsh, garish colors by dialing down the saturation so that the colors end up looking a little less intense than they appeared in the original snapshot. That's a useful trick in photos whose composition is so strong that the colors are almost distracting.

Here's how to find the Saturation slider in each program:

  • iPhoto. Open a photo for editing. Press the letter A to open the Adjust panel.

  • Picasa. Open a photo for editing. Click the Effects tab. Click Saturation.

Drag the Saturation slider to the right for more vivid colors, or to the left for less color. Heck, you can take the picture all the way to black-and-white, if you're so inclined.

Get David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.