First, the “nots”. I am not a follower of any faith based religion, I am not a believer and I am also not a disbeliever in God, I am not a photo journalist, and I do not sell my photos. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains and feel most at home in places of natural beauty. I started taking photos because it was fun. It morphed into a perfect combination: fun, and spiritual dopamine. When I am in the places that end up being in photos that I share, I am happy, and I feel awe and gratitude. Pure dopamine for my agnostic heart. I want to share my photos for friends and family, and my primary motivation is that I want them to experience some of the same awe I feel being there. The problem is that the photo is not “there”. So how does one help them feel the same awe? I am sure there are many ways. An incredible composition and moment in time and light may do that. I’m pretty good at knowing when and how to capture good light, less good at composition. What I have discovered is that boosting the saturation can often create that spark of awe. Of course, all one needs to is look at photos on social media to see the perils that road can lead to. Color can be beautiful and awe inspiring if it doesn’t go overboard. I try not to. Does the slightly oversaturated photo look like the real thing? Of course not. It is a photo, some ink on a piece of paper. It is not a mountain, or a sky, or a tree. Is it art? I don’t know and don’t care. It is my attempt at sharing an emotion that I experienced in nature. If someone looks at my photo and the main thing they experience is the thought “that looks fake”, then I have failed. I recently discovered that after World War II the soon to be American Abstract Expressionist painters hung out together in NYC and couldn’t stop talking about what in the hell they were going to paint. Millions of people had just suffered and died. The only thing that seemed appropriate to paint was dead mutilated bodies. Then they hit the jackpot. They decided that they would paint no form, just color to express emotions. Thus the first American art movement that went world wide was born. It was about color and emotions and the legacy has made my thumb heavy on the saturation lever.
Tony, we agree. The challenge can be difficult at times on amount with many views including monitor calibrations and web browsers. However, without a “fair amount” the image does not look alive. Even with items that are not breathing. My 2 cents worth.
Tony, thanks for posting this. I agree that a certain amount of saturation can boost the impact of the image.
Velvia and Kodachrome both had saturated colors and few people thought they were oversaturated.
In my images, I have found that Capture One’s film profile yields nicely rich colors, similar to the films above. They don’t look oversaturated to me (this coming from a guy who’s red/green colorblind 
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I always felt that Lightroom/ACR created somewhat bland images and the white balance tint was always shifted toward magenta…I regularly had to adjust the white balance and add a bit of vibrance (not saturation) and clarity to make the image pop…In Capture One the saturation slider is more like the vibrance slider in LR.
Anyway, as you said, this is art and should be treated as such.
One thing about NPN: it is a critiquing site not a presentation one, so comments on images will often consider all the elements and processing, including saturation. I try to appreciate those comments as another photographer’s opinion/perspective and choose which suggestions I might use to rework the image.
Hope to see more of your work here, Tony.
Cheers,
David
@David_Bostock @Paul_Breitkreuz Thanks for the comments and feedback!
Interesting topic and it’s one I’ve thought about. If the goal is to produce what one feels then a faithful color representation of the subject is not what one is after. Some scenes require less color and some require more. I’ve often felt that the Painted Hills in Oregon require exaggerated colors and that’s how I process them. On the other hand the mists of the coastal redwoods are destroyed by anything but a hint of color. In regards to abstract expressionism of the 1950s - I think that’s why I spend so much time shooting rocks. I just want a reaction to pure form and color without attachment to the external subject itself. That gives me the freedom to make color adjustment as I see fit. Once a subject is recognizable it becomes much more difficult, especially in photography. I’m a big admirer of the work of Fauvists in the early 20th century but I don’t feel it’s photography any more once colors are manipulated to that degree. It’s photo art. In my mind photography and reality are still bound to a degree. I don’t know where that boundary is but I know when I see it. Perhaps that’s just my limitation. Basically I have trouble with the attitude “anything goes”. It goes as long as it’s still related to the human psyche, to dreams, visions, and fantasies that are common to man. Another words it has to have meanings that we share and relate to.
I find on the Canon cameras I have always had that the default image has also been desaturated from the actual scene. Also, as good as cameras are today, they don’t replicate reality, dynamic range is still not as good as the human eye, different camera manufacturers’ software process colors differently, etc. So I am almost always adding saturation, color adjustments, or adjusting the highlights and shadows.
Aside from that, I think my goal with image processing is to not necessarily replicate the scene I photographed, but to convey to the viewer the feeling, or emotions, I got viewing the scene. So I tend to enhance, in whatever way, the specific elements in the scene that drew me to it in the first place, whether it be color or contrast or patterns, or whatever.
Like you, I never want to make it look unnatural, but given the viewer will never get the same impact as being there in person, sometimes you want to accentuate the image so they can get closer to what you felt.
I’ve been on and tried both ends of the spectrum regarding saturation. I have found that over the years as I became more knowledgeable in post processing I also used saturation less (vibrance really in Lr). These days that level stays between 0-10 on the slider, whereas I can recall values of 20 or so in the past, with the saturation slider as well.
That isn’t to say that my final result isnt’ more saturated than the default image, I just get there a different way. I tend to pump up the white point a little, bring down the highlights to suit, then compress the blacks very slightly and balance with shadow levels. In effect that creates more saturated colors as long as you don’t overdo it.
I agree with what you originally said however, many times an image needs a little pop to convey the feeling you had while there.