Benefits
of the plugin

Saturate without splitting the image into "primaries"
Full 360° colorcircle
Four modes of saturation
Saturate or desaturate individual colors

The saturation filter plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK

saturation
filter controls

This is the saturation plug-ins control panel. Click on the photo or the links to see the plug-in at full size.

The filter has these sets of controls:

1. Mode - achromatic, chromatic, photographic and regular
2. Saturation of all or specific colors
3. Retouch levels
4. Graduated effect
5. Brightness-range
6. Color-range

The saturation plugin is a novel approach to saturation. It saturates in the same way as color and light are interrellated in nature.

Example -

The saturation plugin gives you full control of saturation. here we desaturated blues and saturated yellows.

What is saturation?

What is saturation

Saturation is the relative intensity of a colors hue. In principle saturation should be a distinct quality free from from other qualities such as the colors brightness, but it is not. For example a fully saturated blue should be darker than a fully saturated yellow. That is what makes saturation so complex.

Other saturation tools do not take this into account, since they operate on the intensity of the RGB cathodes in the monitor, not on the appearence of the photo.

How saturation editor differs from other saturation tools

Saturation Editor defines the percentage of saturation-change relative to the image at hand, not relative to maximum luminance of the RGB cathodes in a monitor as other saturation tools do. This means that with Saturation Editor 100% saturation enhancement might produce more spectacular results in some images than in others. The benefit is, you never ruin the integrity of your image.

SaturationEditor allows oversaturation by expanding the slider to 200%. This is useful since oversaturating in Photographic mode might only oversaturate fx a few midtones and leave the rest saturated to a lesser degree than you might want. Remember our 100% is relative the image in toto and is set as the safest optimal level.

The plugin uses a set of complex algorithms to figure out what would be appropriate 100% for that image. This is based on Munsell colorspace and uses a full spectrum colorcircle as a basis for saturation. Instead of the common misnaming of 100% saturation as a 100% rescaling of RGB luminance values, Saturation Editor scans the image and compares each pixels saturation with the rest of the image - and in Photographic mode even also compares with the amount of light in the image, that falls on the given object. Saturation Editor then sets 100% to the degree where the image can be saturated the most without compromising any of the above mentioned criteria.

The plug-ins controls

Saturation

The first slider adjusts saturation from -100% ( which produces a grayscale-image) to 200%.

The seven other sliders lets you adjust saturation for specific colors.

The sliders cooperate with each other, so you can use All to saturate every color and then use for example Red to either avoid saturating reds or to enhance reds further.

In the example below, we used the settings shown to turn the background sky greyscale and enhance the color of the flower.

The mode control set

Four modes of saturation

The plugin offers four modes of saturation. The slider "Include" is only available for the two modes Chromatic and Achromatic.

Photographic mode saturates in the same way color and light are interdependent in nature. Thus dark blues can get saturated more than dark yellows, pale blues less than bright yellow, etc.

Chromatic saturation maps the saturation of the original image and preserves the naturalness of its color relationships.

Achromatic saturation is a special mode that will only saturate vaguely colored areas in order to bring out the inherent colors in them. Be careful with this method if your image has much colored film grain or scanner noise.

Please download the original tiff image ("Gisli.tif") and try for yourself. Test against the saturation tool in any common image editing application to compare. Other saturation tools split the image up into chunks of primary colors.

Graduated effect

These controls are common for many of the Power Retouche plug-ins. Using graduated effect will cause the filter to apply it's filtering at full strength in one side of the image and then fade the effect out towards the other side. You can change direction by right clicking the preview. Midpoint will shift the balance between how large an area will be filtered at full strength and how much will have a faded out effect. Contrast will change the accelleration and spread of the fade-out.

In this example we applied a graduated effect towards the bottom, setting midpoint low. This retouch saturated the foreground without altering the horizon or sky. Thus creating a greater sense of depth.

The Brightness range control set

These controls are common to most Power retouche plugin filters.

Dark limit - only color brighter than this will be filtered.
Light limity - only colors darker then this will be filtered.
Target - pixels at this brightness level will be filtered the most.
Softness - When set to 0 all pixels in range get filtered equally (in that case softness is functionally at 0). At 100 the effect fades out until its o at the limit-values.

Example of brightness range filtering

In this example we used regular saturation mode and targeted the clouds in order to leave the evening sky as it is...

Saturation 100%
Dark limit 126
Light limit 240
Target 240
Softness 100%

Please compare with above examples.

The color range control set

Color range saturation

The color range controls set is also common to most of the Power Retouches.

These are the settings used in the example...