Feeding the color back

You used this control once already, at the tail of the correction pass. Chroma was the fourth job there, set after the tone and the balance were settled. It was one step in a sequence there. Here it is the whole job, and the part that sequence skipped is where to stop and how to tell you have gone past it.

A log image viewed without its intended transform may look low-contrast and muted, but that appearance does not prove the recorded chroma is missing. Read the vectorscope and the reference. Pull all chroma out and the image becomes grayscale; add only what the intended picture calls for.

Read the vectorscope and picture together. A saturation move generally pushes samples outward, but there is no universal cloud shape or distance that marks "too much." Stop when the image matches the reference, preserves important color detail, and supports the scene's intent.

Resolve's Saturation control sits in the Primaries palette and scales color across the image. Color Boost is a different control: it favors colors that begin less saturated and holds back colors that are already vivid. Core uses Saturation first because its effect is easier to see and explain. Color Boost becomes useful later, after you can recognize which colors are reaching their limit.

On people-centered material, skin is often the most perceptually sensitive limit: cheeks can turn ruddy or artificial while the scenery still seems plausible. How far out a face's color can reach before it cooks is what the Skin room measures, and it gets a name there. On another shot, a saturated sign, fabric, or single channel may fail first. Watch the subject that matters, preserve color variation, and ease back when added chroma stops revealing color and starts flattening it.

```sketch { "kind": "range", "orientation": "vertical", "scale": { "min": 0, "max": 100, "unit": "" }, "bars": [ { "label": "chroma", "from": 0, "to": 52, "accent": true } ], "markers": [ { "at": 52, "label": "the reference" }, { "at": 72, "label": "smeared" } ], "caption": "Match the reference's reach while preserving variation in the colors that matter. More distance is not automatically better." } ```