Saturation and vibrance are two tools that can help you to enhance, moderate or disturb colors and their intensity in digital images in Photoshop.
Originally, I have never really tried to get to the bottom of the difference between these two very similar tools. I try to learn on the job if I might say so, I am a very intuitive Photohop user. I love discovering new techniques, however I try to grasp what is useful to me at the time. When I have a question, only then I look for answers quizzing Hector Hurtado (who seems to know almost everything), reading blogs, watching youtube videos, searching google. These are my favorite sources of information.
Here is what I found out:
There is a vivid difference in the effects saturation and vibrance can create on an image, and till very recently I just visually checked whether I preferred one effect over the other.
Visual impact is not the only factor that should be taken into the consideration, as we, the general Photoshop users are probably are aware, that every action/tool used on the digital image has a particular impact on its quality. Needless to say, saturation and vibrance also make their mark, as illustrated below:
As you can see, saturation is changing the intensity of all colors in this picture. It can over-saturate certain colors, and may result in loss of detail. It can also over-saturate the skin tones leaving them looking unnatural.
On the other hand, vibrance is a smart-tool! It increases the intensity of the more muted colors and leaves the already well-saturated colors untouched. It also prevents skin tones from becoming overly saturated, which is particularly useful in the case of portraiture.
I still tend to use both of the tools, depending on what sort of images I am working on. However, as my skills improved and my style changed, my preference lays on the vibrance side for its automatic sense of intensity of colors.
How about you? What do you prefer?
I hope this was useful!