If you're cranking up saturation on every photo, you might be destroying your subject's skin tones. The difference between Photoshop's vibrance and saturation tools can make or break your portrait edits.
Coming to you from Phlearn, this comprehensive video breaks down exactly when to use each color enhancement tool and why it matters for your workflow. Nace demonstrates how vibrance specifically protects skin tones while still boosting the colors around your subject, making it ideal for any image containing people. When you push saturation to the max, faces turn into unnatural, oversaturated disasters that scream amateur hour. The video shows a side-by-side comparison that makes this difference crystal clear. You'll see how the same adjustment settings produce completely different results depending on which tool you choose.
The tutorial goes beyond basic vibrance versus saturation by introducing Photoshop's hue/saturation adjustment layer, which gives you surgical precision over individual colors. This tool lets you target specific color ranges in your image without affecting everything else. Nace shows how to use the eyedropper tool to select exact colors you want to modify, then adjust just those tones while leaving skin completely untouched. The 2025 redesign of this feature makes color selection even more intuitive than before. You can enhance background foliage, adjust clothing colors, or create mood shifts by targeting individual hues.
What makes this approach powerful is the layered workflow Nace recommends. Instead of relying on a single adjustment, you start with vibrance to enhance the overall image while protecting skin tones, then add targeted hue/saturation adjustments for specific color tweaks. This combination gives you both broad enhancement and precise control. The video demonstrates how this layered approach creates more natural-looking results than any single adjustment could achieve. You'll understand why professional retouchers rarely use straight saturation adjustments on portraits. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Nace.
