The Photoshop® Elements 10 Book for Digital Photographers

Making Your Colors More Vibrant

Besides the White Balance control, there’s only one other adjustment for color that you want to use to make your colors more vibrant, and that’s the Vibrance slider. Rather than making all your colors more saturated (which is what the Saturation slider does), the Vibrance slider is smarter—it affects the least saturated colors the most, it affects the already saturated colors the least, and it does its darndest to avoid flesh tones as much as possible. It’s one very savvy slider, and since it came around, I avoid the Saturation slider at all costs.

Step One:

Here’s an image where the colors are kind of flat and dull. If I used the Saturation slider, every color in the image would get the same amount of saturation, ...