saturation

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,344 of 15,258leans written

Saturation is how strong and pure the colours are. Raise the saturation, low saturation, saturation slider.

Pushing it up is the commonest way to ruin a photograph, because skin goes orange long before anything else looks better. Zero saturation is black and white. In chemistry a saturated solution holds as much as it can dissolve, which is the original sense.

Definitions of saturation

1nounsaturationHow strong and pure the colours are.B2+
“Turn down the saturation a little, because the colours in the photo look too bright.”

saturation is a setting.

Where it comes from

Latin saturatio comes from saturare, to fill, from satur, full. Satisfy and satiate are relatives.

Latin
saturatio
English, today
saturation

Borrowed from Latin saturatio. Latin saturatio, saturationem.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Photography & Film

Practise this word

saturation in the wild

The water table is the upper surface of the phreatic zone or zone of saturation.
Water table
At increasing depths, water fills in more of the pore spaces in the soils, until a zone of saturation is reached.
Water table
HSL stands for hue, saturation, and lightness, and is often also called HLS.
HSL and HSV
HSV stands for hue, saturation, and value, and is also often called HSB (B for brightness).
HSL and HSV
Unlike other ambient pressure diving, the saturation diver is only exposed to external ambient pressure while at diving depth.
Saturation diving

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

← Vocabulary