Saturation Vibrance

Saturation and vibrance are the two color knobs that everyone pretends are the same thing until they touch both. Saturation hits every pixel equally. Vibrance is the smart one - it pushes the washed-out, muted colors up while leaving the already-saturated ones alone, which is why skin tones survive it and "crank saturation" doesn't. Saturation Vibrance from TrophiHunter's Photography Nodes pack gives you both on one node, and it's the color adjustment I reach for more than any other in the pack, because it's the least likely to wreck a face.

How it works

The node converts your image to HSV internally, does its work in that space, and converts back. saturation_factor simply scales the saturation of every pixel - 1.0 is unchanged, below 1 desaturates, above 1 boosts. vibrance_factor is where it gets interesting: it compares each pixel's saturation against the image's average saturation and nudges accordingly. The author's convention, straight from the node description: negative values for vibrance increase muted colors; positive values decrease them. So a small negative, like −0.15 or −0.3, is the "make the dull colors come alive" setting. A positive value is the "tame the oversaturated parts" setting, which pairs nicely with the photorealism crowd's finding that AI images trend oversaturated and pulling saturation back 5–10% makes them read as captured rather than generated.

Inputs

• image - IMAGE in, IMAGE out.
• saturation_factor - 0 to 2, default 1. Leave at 1 if you only want vibrance.
• vibrance_factor - −4 to 4, default 0. Start around ±0.15–0.3; the range is wide so you have headroom, not because you should use all of it.

The single output IMAGE feeds your Preview/Save or the next effect. In the pack's example workflow it sits early in the chain - right after Levels, before Contrast and Tint - which is the right instinct: fix color before you fix shape.

Installing it

It ships with the whole Photography Nodes pack, so install once:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TrophiHunter/ComfyUI_Photography_Nodes
# restart, then find it under TrophiHunter/Photography

Or ComfyUI Manager → search "Photography Nodes" by TrophiHunter → install → restart. No models, no requirements.txt, no setup beyond the restart.

Troubleshooting

Default settings are a no-op, which is correct - you should see no change until you move a knob, and if you don't, you haven't. If colors look muddy after upscaling, a touch of negative vibrance does more than saturation. And the standard warning: once saturation_factor climbs past about 1.3, skin turns to uncanny orange and gradients start banding. Vibrance is forgiving; saturation is not.