Glossary:Saturation (colour)

The saturation of a colour is its purity. This can be used together with the chrominance (the hue) and the luminance (the brightness) as an alternative to specifying the red, green and blue (RGB) components. This is useful because the eye perceives variations of chrominance and saturation across an image much less sharply than variations of luminance. Hence these latter can be presented at lower definition with no visible degradation in the image, so saving storeage or transmission bandwidth.