If you want control over the vibrancy of color within your image as well as having the ability to make your image cooler or warmer, you will want to check out the Brilliance/Warmth Filter.

There are three different global adjustments available that will allow you to control the Saturation, Warmth and Perceptual Saturation. Let’s take a look at each of these filter effects.

The Saturation slider defaults at 0% but by simply moving it to the right, this will increase the saturation of colors throughout the image. Moving the slider to the left will decrease the saturation and at -100, this will desaturate the colors from the image to create a gray scale image.

Warmth will either add more reds to the image by moving the slider to the right thus warming up the image or move the slider to the left to introduce more blues to cool down the image. Try moving the slider left or right to get just the effect that you want.

Perceptual Saturation is a new setting in the Brilliance/Warmth filter in Color Efex Pro 4. This is different from the Saturation filter in that it doesn’t increase the overall saturation of the image. Instead, it affects the hues and their complimentary color in the surrounding colors to increase the perception of additional saturation.

Tip: To see the difference between Saturation and Perceptual Saturation, try stacking 2 Brilliance/Warmth filters. In the first filter, set the Saturation to 50%. In the second filter, set the Perceptual Saturation to 50%. Toggle on and off (click on the check box next to the text Brilliance/Warmth) on each of the filters to see before and after to compare the two filters to visually see the difference.