Adjust Saturation & Hue

Free Image Saturation and Hue Adjustment Tool

Adjust saturation and hue of your photos online for free with our powerful color editor. Perfect for enhancing colors, creating artistic effects, color grading, fixing color casts, making images black and white, shifting color tones, and creative photo editing. Features real-time live preview, quick presets (vivid, muted, warm, cool, grayscale), and precise manual controls for saturation, hue rotation, and lightness. All processing happens locally in your browser—no server upload required, ensuring complete privacy. Works with JPG, PNG, WebP and all common formats. No watermark, no registration, unlimited use.

What is saturation and hue?

SATURATION controls color intensity—how vivid or muted colors appear. 100% saturation means full, vibrant colors. 0% saturation removes all color, creating grayscale. Negative saturation makes colors more muted and washed out. Positive saturation makes colors more vivid and punchy. HUE controls the actual color tone—rotating through the color spectrum. Adjusting hue shifts all colors: red becomes orange/purple, blue becomes cyan/purple, etc. It's measured in degrees (0-360°) on the color wheel. LIGHTNESS controls overall brightness without affecting saturation—making colors lighter or darker while maintaining their vibrancy.

When should I adjust saturation?

Increase saturation (+): dull or washed-out photos, flat colors from poor lighting, landscape/nature photography to make vibrant, product photography to showcase colors, social media posts for eye-catching results. Decrease saturation (-): overly saturated photos from phone cameras, creating subtle/muted aesthetic, portrait photography for natural skin tones, preparing images for printing. Full desaturation (-100%): creating black and white images, vintage effects, artistic photography, removing color distractions.

How do I use hue adjustment?

Hue rotation shifts all colors around the color wheel. Use it for: fixing color casts (greenish indoor lighting, bluish shadows), creative effects (turning sky from blue to pink), seasonal changes (making summer look like autumn), artistic color grading, matching colors between images, creating surreal effects. Small adjustments (±10-30°) are subtle corrections. Medium adjustments (±30-90°) create noticeable stylistic changes. Large adjustments (±90-180°) create dramatic color inversions and artistic effects.

What are the quick presets?

VIVID: +40% saturation, +5% lightness - makes colors pop, great for landscapes and social media. MUTED: -30% saturation - creates soft, subtle, vintage-like aesthetic. WARM: +20% saturation, +10° hue, +5% lightness - adds golden/orange tones, perfect for cozy feels and sunsets. COOL: +20% saturation, -10° hue - adds blue/cyan tones, creates calm, professional look. GRAYSCALE: -100% saturation - removes all color for classic black and white. These presets are starting points—feel free to fine-tune after applying.

Can I make a photo black and white?

Yes! Set saturation to -100% or use the Grayscale preset. This removes all color information while preserving tonal contrast. For creative control, you can then adjust lightness to fine-tune the black and white balance. Unlike simple desaturation, this tool preserves image quality. For artistic black and white photography, try combining grayscale with slight adjustments to lightness and you can even add a subtle hue shift before desaturating to create tinted black and white effects (sepia, cyanotype, etc.).

How does hue rotation work?

Hue rotation shifts colors around the HSL color wheel. The wheel is circular, so 0° and 360° are the same. Adjusting hue by +60° moves: red → yellow, yellow → green, green → cyan, cyan → blue, blue → magenta, magenta → red. Negative values rotate in the opposite direction. The tool allows ±180° rotation. At ±180°, colors invert to their opposites: red ↔ cyan, yellow ↔ blue, green ↔ magenta. This is useful for creative effects, fixing extreme color casts, or creating complementary color schemes.

Why use this instead of brightness/contrast tools?

Brightness/contrast tools adjust lightness and tonal range but don't affect color intensity or hue. Use saturation/hue when you need to: change color intensity (make more or less colorful), shift color tones (fix color casts, change seasons), create specific color moods (warm vs cool), remove color entirely (black and white), fix oversaturation from phone cameras, match colors between images, creative color grading. For best results, you can use both tools together—adjust brightness/contrast first for tonal range, then saturation/hue for color work.

Will this affect image quality?

Moderate adjustments have minimal quality impact. Extreme adjustments may cause: High saturation (+80-100%): color clipping, posterization in gradients, loss of subtle color variations. Full desaturation: permanent color data loss (can't recover original colors after saving). Extreme hue shifts: may reveal compression artifacts. The tool uses high-quality HSL color space conversion to minimize quality loss. For best results: work with high-quality originals, make adjustments gradually, avoid extreme values unless intentional, save at high quality, keep original files.

Can I adjust specific colors only?

This tool adjusts all colors uniformly—it's a global adjustment. All colors shift by the same amount. For selective color editing (changing only reds, only blues, etc.), you'd need advanced tools with color masking. However, you can achieve some selective effects: to enhance only already-saturated areas, use moderate saturation increases. To shift warm vs cool tones differently, combine saturation with hue rotation. For most general color enhancement, global adjustments work great and are much faster than selective editing.

What's the difference between saturation and lightness?

SATURATION changes color intensity—how pure/vivid colors are. High saturation = vivid colors. Low saturation = washed out/gray colors. It doesn't change how light or dark the image is. LIGHTNESS changes brightness—how light or dark colors are. High lightness = lighter colors. Low lightness = darker colors. It doesn't change color intensity. Example: a vivid red rose can be dark (low lightness, high saturation) or bright (high lightness, high saturation). A pale pink rose has low saturation but medium-high lightness. Adjusting both together gives complete control over color appearance.