Time Immortal

Periodically, when I am tinkering with a photo in Lightroom, I will apply a number of adjustments to the saturation (i.e. how colourful something appears relative to its brightness; saturation can be thought of as a function of the “colourfulness” of a particular hue divided by its brightness) of a particular colour, or a range of colours. Lightroom affords me a fair bit of leeway in this regard, allowing me to individually modify the saturations of the following hues within an image:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Aqua
• Blue
• Purple
• Magenta

That makes for a fairly broad range of possible adjustments, and it is interesting to note that the character of a photograph can change dramatically based on how one messes with various colour saturations.

For example, take this picture, which was previously a Pic of the Day:

That’s the image in its “base” form — I haven’t done much to the colour saturations in any meaningful sense, apart from a few positive adjustments to the oranges and reds.

Not as many as in this image, admittedly:

For this picture, I boosted the orange and red saturations pretty heavily; saturations in all the other colour channels were reduced to -100, effectively removing other hues from the image.

Here’s what happens with blues and purples are retained instead:

This image doesn’t work as well, since the blue crates are fairly dark at this angle, and almost blend with the other crates (which have all turned grey from having had their colours desaturated). The orange/red-only image, however, works fairly well; for a while, it almost was selected as the Pic of the Day over the original. But in the end, I decided to use the one that kept all the colours.

Still, O Reader, let this be an example of what kind of utility saturation adjustments in photographs can present to a photographer; in many respects, simply taking a moment to adjust the saturation in even one colour channel can turn the image into an almost completely different scene.