Saturation is a measure of a color's pureness and brilliance. It is the colorfulness of an area judged in proportion to its brightness. The image below is an example of an image that goes from being brightly saturated to being desaturated. You can see how the hue has not changed but has been removed. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Saturation speaks to the part of color that we see and describe as bright or dull. If you want to dull a paint color, you decrease its saturation. If you think it's too muddy or dull, you want the saturation to be clearer or more pure -- closer to the color's root hue. Adjusting saturation means adding black, gray, or color complements to a paint color in order to decrease saturation which will dull it or "knock it back". Doing so moves the color farther away from its purest state of hue. The more black, gray, or complement you add to a color, the more neutralized the color becomes.

In subtractive color processing like CMYK, the more we mix colors the less pure they become; therefore, the color appears dull. In additive color processing, greys are a balance of red, green and blue, a mid range level grey is R 128, G 128, B 128. The balance of color produces the absence of color since in this case because the RGB additive color system cancel each other out.

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