Adjust Image Hue and Saturation

Dull holiday photos, over-saturated phone shots, a product that needs to come in a different colour — hue and saturation controls fix all of these. This tool converts every pixel to hue, saturation and lightness, applies your changes and converts back, the same model photo editors use for their Hue/Saturation panel. Raise saturation to make colours pop, use vibrance to lift muted colours without turning skin orange, rotate the hue to recolour, or set saturation to −100 for a grey picture. Batch many images at once; nothing is uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more images.
2. Set saturation (−100 to +100); try +20 to +40 for dull photos.
3. Optionally add vibrance, shift the hue or change the lightness.
4. Choose the output format.
5. Download the adjusted images, or all of them as a ZIP.

Formula

S′ = S × (1 + saturation) × (1 + vibrance × (1 − S)); H′ = H + shift; L′ = L + (1 − L) × lightness (or L × (1 + lightness) when darkening)

H, S and L are the HSL hue (0–360°), saturation and lightness (0–1) of each pixel; the percentages are used as fractions (−1 to 1) and S′ is clamped to 0–1. Vibrance scales its effect by how unsaturated a colour already is, so strong colours change little. Transparency is kept.

Example

A blue pixel RGB (38, 99, 234) has H = 221°, S = 0.82 and L = 0.53. At saturation +100 S doubles and is capped at 1, giving (17, 91, 255) — a pure, vivid blue. A hue shift of 180° keeps S and L but moves H to 41°, giving the orange (234, 173, 38). At saturation −100 the pixel becomes grey (136, 136, 136).