Photography Pet Peeve - Saturation

If you're looking for various tips to help grow your photography, I'm going to offer a few options of what not to do, or as I like to call them, my pet peeves.

If you don't know what a pet peeve is, here's the definition: Something that a particular person finds especially annoying.

In this article, I'm going to talk about saturation. "PLEASE DO NOT OVER SATURATE YOUR PHOTOS!" To me, oversaturation is a sure sign of a bad photo the photographer is trying to improve, or a sign of a new photographer not knowing what they're doing. We all have to start somewhere, so I get that, but there are many photographers that seem to think they need to over saturate their photos and they've been a photographer for a few years. It just DOES NOT LOOK GOOD for a photo!

If you're going to add a lot of saturation, you need to make the photo more artistic or turn it into a mixed media image. Photography should show the natural beauty of the world, landscape, subject etc. Enhancing the color is fine, but try to keep it natural looking with a little "pop"! Be sure to watch your skies. Skies are so easily over saturated, especially sunsets and sunrises. When you over saturate, the sky looks too deep of a blue, sunsets/sunrises look way to yellow or orange to the point where you can tell it's fake.

This autumn season was coming a little later than normal here in the Springfield Missouriarea. It's been a few years since we've had good color here and this was one of those years the color finally popped a lot more than it has! I have a particular weekend every year I take a small trip to capture some fall images. I was watching a local facebook page for the best place to go since the color was spotty at the time. Finally someone posted a photo of an area about an hour and half north of me. I could tell the photo was very saturated but it looked like a great place to go check out. We went to the exact spot where they took the photo and I was amazed at how over saturated this persons photo was. It was basically the difference between night and day. There was hardly any color there at all. It was frustrating that they were advertising it as being very colorful at this location. Luckily I did find some color in a different area nearby but not as much as I hoped.

Yes, I knew before going there, that photo was extremely edited, but I thought it had to have a little bit of color, at least more than what we had in Springfield. I have since noticed that same person post more photos and every single one of them is so over saturated.

I also see several photographers on some of the biggest art print on demand sites with the same issues. I've seen some of those same people ask why they aren't getting any sales too.

I do enhance a few of my photos, but rarely ever do I increase the saturation by more than 20 - 25 in Lightroom. Every camera is different and that seems to be a good LR setting for my Sony Camera's. One of the things I love about Sony is the color! You'll have to determine your best settings based on your camera.

If you want to sell your art world wide, my advice is to study and explore some of the top selling photographers around the world and you'll see they do not add too much saturation to their photos.

That's my opinion on one of my pet peeves. Check back for more tips. What are your photography pet peeves? Comment below.