Back in the day, my favourite film to shoot with was Agfa Ultra 100. It wasn’t a subtle film. The colours were punchy, saturated, and – so far as greens were concerned – often quite unrealistic.

This photo shows all the characteristics of Agfa Ultra. The deep cyan-blue, the warm reds in the masonry, the gentle roll-off of the shadows; and, crucially, the neutral white of the road sign.

It also shows, even for Agfa Ultra, an intense level of saturation in the sky. Looking at that shocking blue, combined with the lack of any glare or reflections on the enamel sign, I’m pretty sure I must have been shooting with a polarising lens. The effect is striking, creating an almost surreal hyper-realism.

Back in 2003 when I took this photo, there’s no way I would have done any editing on it. What you see here is the raw scan from the Kodak CLAS HR200 scanner which was used in the processing lab. Look closely at the EXIF and you’ll see it’s been saved in ACDSee, but that was a simple resizing exercise. No editing required.

To answer my own question from the heading: how much saturation is too much? This is. I’d never saturate a digital image as much as this. Film though? Agfa Ultra gets away with it, by the skin of its teeth.