Desaturation
Reducing the intensity of colour, either globally toward monochrome or selectively within a range.
Measured in
%
In depth
Full desaturation using a saturation slider produces a poor black and white conversion, because it weights the channels arbitrarily rather than according to how the eye responds — a dedicated monochrome conversion with channel mixing gives far better tonal separation. Partial desaturation, by contrast, is a subtle and widely useful grading tool.
Examples in practice
Desaturating only the greens by thirty per cent stops summer foliage overwhelming a portrait's skin tones.