To saturate or not to saturate...and how much?

OK, corny-as-hell and Shakespeare must be doing a few extra RPM in his grave. I simply could not come up with something catchy AND non-corny, forgive me.

In this article I will discuss a few ideas on saturation and the final end-result image. Saturation, or the lack of it, is how vividly or flat colours are displayed in the end result work. Now I do not wish to discuss all the ways saturation can be introduced to the image. I would simply say that I personally shoot neutral files and apply saturation to taste in post-production.

For a start, I can't show the original off-camera image here because what you see is a combination of two exposures. One was a good sky with a practically black foreground. The other was a good foreground with the sky so over-exposed it is practically a white-out.

In a previous article here I share a bit on how I blend exposures if you would like to read more about that.

Let's look at an example from the archives, shall we?

The above image is from a good few years back. As you can see it was a fairly dull and cloudy afternoon but around sunset there was some colour in the sky.

Now saturation can make or break an image. The camera settings are mostly applied to jpeg images and not the raw file. The big question is whether raw files still have a place as they had 10 - 15 years ago. Is the off-camera jpeg good enough? Possibly old habits but I personally prefer to work with the raw file and for two reasons. There is more info in the raw file. This is mainly because the raw file is of a higher bit depth than the 8-bit jpeg. This makes the raw file a good bit more robust.

This is where it gets very interesting when you use the off-camera jpeg. Even if your in-camera jpeg settings are "Neutral" or "Standard" those parameters are made in a lab and not on location where you shoot. Those "neutral" colours could be perfect according to a camera engineer in the lab but they don't respect your location, lighting conditions or desired end-result. They are also far removed from capturing as the human eye sees. International standards, colour charts and a lot of hypothetical theory rules supreme.

The most important question, to me, is does my eye see exactly as yours does? There are so many other factors in this sequence of events I could hardly mention them all. Discussing them all could take weeks.

The annoying bit is that unwanted things such as banding can spoil an image even before it is overworked. This is why I still prefer raw files.

As a photographer we develop and mature along with the rest of life's journey. Priorities change, viewpoints change. Well some of us do anyway. As our skills improve we often cringe at work we may have been very proud of a few years prior. I know I do...

Much to my delight I recently read this exact sentiment on the blog of a South African landscape photographer I greatly admire and learned a lot from, Hougaard Malan.

Any old way we slice it, as photographers we capture what we see. This means our work had to be visual to the camera lens at some stage. How we put together the eventual end-result work is, of course, a matter of the individual taste and style of the photographer. Painters are fortunate that way. They produce their complete works from imagination and their interpretation of visual inputs.

Now, back to saturation. I love colours and I love vivid colours. The one way to make colours more vivid is to apply saturation. Overdo it though, and the end result could be downright awful and cheesy. On rare occasion a heavily over-saturated image could work but this is truly rare.

So at the end of the day it probably does not matter. Your style, your purpose and your target market.

I challenge anyone to say that Claude Monet went for the most realistic reproduction of this sunset.

San Giorgio Maggiore At Dusk by Claude Monet.

This image is from this website here and it is used purely for illustrative purposes.

No, I am not for a moment placing myself in Monet's leagues. What I am trying to say is that many of us can't even draw a stick man worth a damn and so we use photography to express our artistic intent. There is no right or wrong. Your art, your story, your way. Corporate boardroom wall or a wall in your home, it makes little difference.

So what is the moral of the story? Get out there. Play, create, fail, revisit and succeed. We never fail until we stop trying.

And remember to have lots of fun in the process.

Until next time,

Anton