Color Saturation In Portrait Photography: Why It Matters
July 28, 2025
Colour saturation is how we can make our photos come to life with an added pop of vibrancy and rich tones. We can even control the saturation across separate colour channels, allowing us to select one or two colours to deliver impact in our shot. However, saturation can come at a cost. There’s a fine line between results looking natural and unnatural, something that beginners can find hard to navigate. Throw skin tones into the mix, and that line becomes even trickier.
In today’s article, we’re going to explore how to control colour saturation in portrait photography so you can get professional results with ease. We’ll be using the portrait-dedicated software Aperty to help you add light to a photo and achieve high-quality looks quickly and efficiently. Let’s get started!
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What is Colour Saturation?
Let’s take a quick look at what colour saturation is and how it differs from vibrancy. While both are used to enhance colour, saturation increases the intensity of all colours in your image. Vibrancy, on the other hand, reads the tones in your photo and boosts the more muted colours.
Although vibrancy is a helpful tool for bringing life into dull areas of a shot, it can still affect skin tones and make them appear unnatural if pushed too far. We’re going to show you how professionals approach this issue and how to keep your colours looking rich and balanced.
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Try Aperty NowTo Increase or Decrease—That’s the Question
The saturation slider doesn’t just go up. You can also reduce it, giving negative values to desaturate colours and make them less vibrant. Professional photographers and editors understand this balance and know how to adjust based on what the image needs. So, when should you increase or decrease saturation?
Adjustment | When to Increase Saturation | When to Decrease Saturation |
Mood | Make the photo vibrant, energetic, or lively. | Create muted, moody, or cinematic vibes. |
Emphasis | Highlight clothing, makeup, or accessories so they stand out. | Tone down distracting colours pulling focus from the subject. |
Background | Add life to a flat or dull background to balance the shot. | Subdue background colours to make the subject pop more clearly. |
With experience, you’ll be able to assess each image and instinctively know whether to push that saturation slider up or pull it down.
Working with Skin Tones
Unfortunately, the saturation balance for skin tones is a fine tightrope, with mistakes often looking unnatural and distracting. The skin and face of your model or subject are the most crucial aspects of a portrait photo, so let’s take a closer look at how to manage them with Aperty.
Highlights include:
Skin retouching and blemish removal: Achieve flawless results while preserving natural skin texture for a polished but realistic look.
Make-up application: No make-up artist on set? Aperty allows you to apply highly realistic make-up in post with full control over strength and tone.
Body reshaping: Adjust the shape and size of the body or reposition facial features while maintaining a natural appearance.
Essential photo editing: All the core editing tools you need are built into Aperty, saving you the hassle of switching between different software.
Creative tools: Add your own touch of creativity with effects designed to give your photos a unique and eye-catching finish.
Adjusting Saturation in Aperty
Now let’s take a look at how to get great results with saturation in Aperty while still maintaining natural skin tones.
Masks
Masks are a photo editor’s best friend as they enable us to work on specific parts of an image. Aperty really helps out here by automatically distinguishing your subject from the background and masking them with just one click. Head to the Mask button on the right side menu (second option down), and select Mask People to make your selection. Later on, when we work on the background, you can also select Mask Background to work on that separately.
Saturation and HSL
With your subject selected, head to Essential tools (fourth option on the right). Skin tones are delicate, so making global adjustments with the saturation tool may deliver unnatural results. Thankfully, HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) is here to help give us more nuanced control over the separate colour channels.
Colour Channels
We’re going to break this down into separate colour channels that will cover all skin tones. Generally speaking, we want to enhance the warmth in the skin, albeit naturally, and avoid certain tones such as green altogether.
Orange
Across all ethnicities, skin tones sit somewhere in the orange channel.
Increase: To bring a healthy glow to a subject’s skin.
Decrease: To reduce any unwanted redness.
Red
Flushed cheeks, lips, and any redness can be controlled within the red channel.
Increase: For rosier cheeks and a natural blush.
Decrease: If the face is too flushed or red, you can decrease here to bring a more even balance.
Yellow
This is a crucial tone to work with as it can either give the skin a healthy warmth or an unnatural look depending on the lighting and base tones.
Increase: To bring more warmth to your subject’s face.
Decrease: To remove any unnatural colour casts.
Blue and Green
As these do not occur naturally in skin, we recommend reducing these tones to prevent unnatural results.
Magenta and Purple
These may be required in special cases, such as correcting a green colour cast on the face. You might also need to reduce these tones if colour casts occurred during the shoot due to lighting.
Luminance
Don’t be afraid to adjust luminance as well. This lets you lighten or darken specific tones, helping you refine the skin tone balance even further.
Face Skin Colour Corrections
If you’re struggling to get a natural skin tone, Aperty has a powerful feature to help. Inside the Retouch menu (fifth option down), you’ll find the Face Skin tools, including Face Skin Colour Correction. Aperty will automatically analyse your image and correct unwanted tones based on what’s present.
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Try Aperty NowCreative Looks Using Saturation
There is so much you can do with saturation to completely change the tone and mood of your shot. These following tips can be applied either to the subject or the background to create a signature look.
Vibrant Editorial: Magazine covers need to stand out from the crowd, and one way they do that is with bold and bright colours that grab attention. Boost key colours in your image for an extra pop.
Cinematic Mood: A classic way to achieve the big-screen look is to slightly desaturate tones and introduce rich contrast. You can also use colour contrast combinations, such as a cooler background with a warmer subject, to enhance the effect.
Muted Tones: For a clean and modern aesthetic, pull back on overall saturation. This delivers a more understated and contemporary feel.
The Bottom Line
Saturation can make or break an image, with professionals understanding how to use it to set the mood or add a vibrant pop. Beginners, on the other hand, often struggle to find the right balance, leading to unnatural colour casts and distracting tones. It gets even trickier when working with skin tones, which must look natural and well-preserved to deliver a professional finish.
By learning how to balance tones (especially the warmer hues), you’ll be able to create a flawless result. With HSL sliders giving you full control over separate colour channels, Aperty also offers a helpful tool to keep things in check: the Face Skin Colour Correction feature.
Give these tips a try and apply the techniques we’ve explored today to your own editing. You’ll be one step closer to creating images that look polished and professional.
