Saturation as a single parameter is a bit strange to me. For me it is a lot more about distributing light across the frame in a way that makes it come to life. This involves contrast a lot and local adjustments. I use the tone mapping sliders a lot and use also white and black point in setting contrast. I fine tune contrast to my liking using the tone curve and not very often via the contrast slider. I use clarity sparingly and most pictures I do not touch either the saturation or vibrance sliders. The saturation in my images comes as a side effect of making the contrast and exposure and other light adjustments. I sometimes feel like taking the saturation a bit down and then drag either saturation or vibrance down but it seldomly successful and therefore it not often I do that.
This is exactly what I see with my own images as well,
sometimes I like said push of saturation and sometimes it is getting a bit too much for me. In the latter case, aside from personal taste, I think there is a particular technical background here:
LR/ACR, since Process Version 2012, allow to apply a quite steep tonal contrast, but - unlike in the past - without blocking the shadow and highlight details which can be well preserved by strong settings with the corresponding Highlights and Shadows controls.
As a side effect from the steeper tonal contrast there is a pronounced push of saturation but
the effect is uneven along the tonal scale: there is more saturation added in the shadows than in the lights. A typical case is that the sky shows a nice saturated blue, whereas e.g. the shadows of mountains get blue-inked in an exaggerated way. Hence, saturation can not be re-balanced by a global saturation slider, so that I have to resort to a more selective approach.
Hope it is clear that I’m not voting for a documentary, scene-referred level of saturation here, which is often not desirable and would simply look ugly. To add saturation is among the key tools to adjust an image (in terms of a pleasing rendition) for the huge difference between the scene dynamic range vs output dynamic range (
the big squeeze). So the absolute level of saturation is quite a matter of individual taste and the viewing conditions, albeit my assumption is that some relative "saturation consistency" could be more a general criterion.
Peter
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