Bring dull colours to life without cooking skin tones or already-bright areas. One slider, live preview, batch for a whole shoot.
Measures how colourful each pixel already is, then pushes it away from grey by an amount that shrinks as the colour gets stronger. A pale sky or a faded wall gets the full effect; a red car or a sunburnt face gets almost none. That is the difference from plain saturation, which multiplies everything equally and is why heavy saturation makes people look ill. The slider runs from −100, which fades the strongest colours, to +100.
A family photo at the beach, 4032 × 3024, shot into hazy light: at +45 the sea goes from grey-blue to turquoise and the towels regain their stripes, while the faces move only a shade warmer. Pushing the same photo to +45 in Change Saturation instead makes the skin orange. A misty forest walk works well at +60 to +70, because nearly every pixel is dull to start with and the green comes back evenly.
Reach for Vibrance first on any photo with people in it, on hazy or backlit shots, and on batches from a phone that came out flat. It is the safe default. Use Change Saturation instead when you want colour removed entirely, or when one dominant colour needs to match reality. If a photo is dull because it is too dark rather than too grey, fix that with Change Exposure or Change Contrast before touching colour, since brightening reveals colour on its own.
Amount is the maximum boost a completely grey pixel would get; real pixels get a fraction of it depending on their own colour. Values between +20 and +50 cover almost every photo. The chips are quick presets. In batch mode every file gets the same amount, which works well because the effect adapts to each picture. Output formats and quality behave as in the other image tools; Same keeps the original type.
Why does vibrance leave faces alone? Skin is already a fairly saturated orange-red, and vibrance scales its boost by how dull a pixel is. A muted blue jacket next to a face might get 80 percent of the slider while the cheek gets 20 percent, so people stay natural while the scene comes alive.
Can I go negative? Yes. Negative values pull colour out of the most colourful pixels first, which gives a gentle, filmic fade that is hard to get with the saturation slider. At −100 the picture is close to, but not quite, black and white.
Vibrance or saturation for a product photo? Saturation. A product shot usually has one strong colour that must match reality, and vibrance would deliberately hold that colour back. Use Change Saturation at 105 to 115 instead.
Is my photo sent anywhere? No. Every pixel is processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and the page keeps working offline.