I decided to go back and re-edit a few photos using perceptual saturation. While not increasing the saturation of colors directly, perceptual saturation alters the hues of colors slightly to increase the perception of the saturation of those colors. This is done by increasing the complementary color component in surrounding colors, which plays off of the brain’s perception of colors in much the same way that perceptual contrast works, where an image appears to have more contrast when placed on a black background. On certain photos, the process does wonders. For example, in this photo of Sacramento’s Cathedral Square, the golden cast of the sun was so strong, the blue of the sky was almost completely lost in the RAW image. Perceptual saturation was able to pull that out. I also replaced the image linked above after re-editing using the same method.

Jeff Turner

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