Saturation can make a strong photo look electric, or it can quietly wreck it in five seconds. If Lightroom is part of your workflow, knowing when to avoid that slider changes how believable your color looks.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle – The Phlog Photography, this practical video goes after Lightroom’s most overused move: cranking saturation until everything screams. Möhrle starts with a simple point that’s easy to forget mid-edit: the saturation slider hits every pixel and every hue in the same blunt way. In a sunset, that usually means the oranges and reds get pushed past the edge first, even if your real goal was to wake up the quieter blues, purples, or foreground tones. He contrasts that with vibrance, which lifts weaker colors more than already-strong ones, so you can add energy without instantly clipping the loudest hues. If you’ve ever wondered why your skies turn crunchy or your warm tones look fake, this is the setup you want in your head before touching anything else.
Then the video shifts from theory to a full edit on a dark raw file, and the order of operations is the part worth stealing. Möhrle starts with noise reduction early, before the heavy pushes that would make grain and color speckling harder to manage. After that, he goes straight to profiles, showing how picking something like Adobe Landscape versus Adobe Neutral changes the baseline saturation before you touch vibrance or saturation at all. That one decision can save you from overcorrecting later, especially if you tend to “fix” color by pushing global sliders. He keeps the global color moves modest on purpose, because the real control comes from targeted work, not blanket intensity.
Where the video gets interesting is the local color control, because it avoids the usual trap of “more color everywhere.” Möhrle uses masking to separate the sky, the foreground, and specific tonal ranges, so saturation becomes a precise tool instead of a hammer. One move you’ll want to watch closely is how he warms only the brighter parts of the sky using a luminance range mask, then intersects that selection so it stays in the sky and doesn’t contaminate the rest of the frame. Inside that mask, he uses saturation to boost highlight color without blowing out darker cloud structure, which is a very different result than pushing global saturation. He also builds glow with a radial mask and a brush on small light sources, but he’s careful about pulling saturation back when those areas start to look synthetic, and he makes those calls in context while the masks are toggled on and off.
After the masking, Möhrle moves into the color mixer and color grading, and this is where you stop thinking in terms of one slider and start thinking in terms of problem colors. He knocks down yellow saturation to calm an ugly cast on a foreground element, then selectively pushes reds, oranges, purples, and magentas to shape the sunset without turning everything else neon. In color grading, he treats highlights, midtones, and shadows as separate worlds, warming and saturating highlights while keeping cooler midtones for contrast. He also shows a calibration tweak he uses often, especially on the blue primary controls, but he frames it as preference, not law, and he leaves room for you to decide where “too much” starts in your own files. The most useful takeaway is not any single setting, but the idea that saturation belongs in small, intentional pockets, not as a global personality trait applied to the whole image. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.