Vibrance
Lift the flat colours in a photo and leave the strong ones alone. Skin tones are held back and nothing is allowed to clip, so it never goes neon.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Lift the flat colours in a photo and leave the strong ones alone. Skin tones are held back and nothing is allowed to clip, so it never goes neon.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drop a photo on the page and drag one slider: the flat, washed-out colours come up and the ones that were already strong stay where they are. That is what vibrance means in photography, and it is why a vibrance filter does what a saturation slider cannot - a hazy sky, dull foliage or a grey-looking street scene gains real colour while a red jacket or a bright sign in the same picture does not turn into a glowing blob. Two things run automatically while you drag: skin tones are held back so faces do not go orange, and the boost on every pixel is capped so no colour channel is ever pushed past its limit. Drag the other way, into the negative, and the muted colours fade toward grey first while the strong ones stay - the quiet, matte look.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, paste one from the clipboard, or pick a file. For a quick vibrance pass, drag Vibrance to the right until the picture looks alive rather than processed - between 30 and 60 is a natural lift for most photos, and 100 is a deliberate, poster-like result. Hold the compare button in the corner of the picture to see where you started; colour is the easiest thing in an image to overdo, because your eye adjusts to it within seconds. The Protect skin tones switch can be turned off when there are no people in the frame and the picture is full of orange and yellow you actually want lifted - autumn leaves, food, a sunset. Press R to reset, then download as PNG, JPG or WebP, or copy the result straight to the clipboard.
Saturation multiplies the colour in every pixel by the same factor. Push it and the whole picture intensifies together, which is fine on a flat scan and disastrous on a photo that already has one strong colour in it: that colour hits the ceiling first, loses all its internal detail, and the picture looks like a printing error.
Vibrance scales the boost by how colourful each pixel already is. A pixel with almost no colour gets the full lift; one that is already vivid gets almost none. The result is a picture with more life in the dull areas and no change where nothing needed changing - which is why photographers reach for vibrance first in editing and saturation only when they want the whole frame to shift.
If a straight, even boost is what you are after - or you need to take a picture all the way to greyscale - the saturation editor does that, and it has a simpler vibrance mode built in. This page is the dedicated one, with the skin-tone and clipping guards that the other does not carry.
How colourful a pixel is gets measured as its saturation relative to its own brightness - the difference between its strongest and weakest colour channel, divided by the strongest. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Measure colour as a flat distance instead, the way a simpler tool does, and every dark pixel looks unsaturated: a shadowed blue jacket or a dim evening sky gets the full boost while the same colour in the light is left alone, and the picture ends up with bright neon patches in its dark areas. Here a dark colour and a light one of the same hue are treated as what they are - the same colour.
The image details card shows the average colour in the picture before and after - the vibrancy of the photo as a number, so you can see what the slider actually did, and the lift being applied to a completely flat colour.
Skin sits in a narrow band of hue, between red and yellow, and it is the first thing to look wrong when colour is pushed: faces go orange several stops before anything else in the frame looks over-cooked. With Protect skin tones on, the boost across that band is scaled down by up to a bit over half, tapering away at both ends so a fire engine, a lemon or a red brick wall still gets its full lift. It is the reason vibrance exists as a separate control in professional editors, and the old version of this page promised it in its description without ever doing it.
Turn it off when the picture has no people in it and you want the warm colours to move as much as everything else.
When colour is boosted the usual way, the strongest channel in a bright pixel runs into 255 and stops. The other two keep going, the ratio between them changes, and the colour shifts hue and flattens into a solid patch - the plastic look of an over-saturated photo. This page works out, for every pixel, the largest boost that still leaves all three channels inside range, and uses that instead. A bright pixel that cannot take more colour keeps its hue and its texture rather than being crushed. Brightness is held constant too, so lifting the colour never changes how light or dark the picture is.
The preview and the download run the same code over the pixels, so the file you save is what you were looking at, at the resolution you opened, with no watermark and no signup. Nothing is uploaded: the picture is decoded and edited inside your browser, which matters for the portraits, holiday photos and client work people run a colour pass on. Transparency is kept, and at 0 the pixels are copied through untouched.
Related pages: change saturation for an even boost or a full greyscale, color grading for shadow, midtone and highlight colour, contrast when the picture is flat rather than dull, and color temperature when the problem is the white balance rather than the colour strength.
It raises the intensity of the colours that are weakest, and leaves the ones that are already strong more or less alone. The effect is a picture that looks brighter and more alive without the flat, cartoonish patches you get from turning saturation up on everything, because the colours that would have been the first to break are the ones the slider barely touches.
Saturation applies the same multiplier to every pixel. Vibrance weights that multiplier by how colourful each pixel already is, so a washed-out sky moves a long way and a saturated red moves hardly at all. On a photo that contains one dominant strong colour, saturation blows that colour out first; vibrance lifts everything else up to meet it.
Not much, and that is deliberate. With the protection switch on, the boost across the red-to-yellow band where skin lives is cut by more than half, so faces keep their natural colour while the rest of the frame gains. If your picture has no people in it, turning the switch off gives warm colours - autumn leaves, food, sunsets - the same lift as everything else.
Start around 30 to 50 for a natural result. Anything above 70 reads as a stated effect rather than a correction, which is right for a poster or a social post and wrong for a portrait or a product shot. Hold the compare button before you commit: your eye adapts to a colour boost in seconds, so the original is the only honest reference.
Yes. Drag the slider to the left and the weighting works in reverse - the muted colours fade toward grey first, the strong ones hold on longest, and the picture takes on a quiet, matte look with a few colours still carrying it. If you want everything to fade evenly, or a true black and white, use the saturation page instead.
No. The photo is read from your device straight into the page, adjusted there by your browser, and handed back as a download. It never reaches a server, and the page keeps working after it has loaded, which is worth knowing when the picture is a portrait, a private photo or client work.