Vignetting

- The other day, we were trying to think of topics for The Practicing Photographer, and I said, "Well let's do something on vignetting," and then, we all kind of looked at each other because it just seemed impossible that we hadn't already done something on vignetting; I mean, it's as if we'd never done something on the shutter button or something. Vignetting, to me, is one of the most critical post-production tools that you will ever use. I use it on the majority of my images. It's kind of this dirty little secret of image editing, I feel like, how much I vignette and how often I feel like that saves an image.

So, here it is, at long last, The Practicing Photographer episode on vignetting. And if you're thinking, "Huh? Who cares? What's the big deal about vignetting?" It's a very simple technique. Vignetting is kind of like cropping. It's a really simple thing you can do that can radically change not the composition of your image, but the viewer's trip through the image. I've got this shot here that, in terms of composition, works pretty well. If the point of composition is to guide the viewer's eye, we're led pretty well right into here right away, except that this bothers me; there's just this extra light over here that doesn't really serve any purpose, and we don't really have any fall-off back here, so while the soft focus helps keep my attention over here, the exposure's not really doing anything to kick attention over here.

With the simple addition of a vignette, I can go from this to this. Let me give you another before and after here. Before. After. It's not a huge change. A well applied vignette is a very subtle thing, but what it's done is darken this bit up over here, it's given me some fall-off over here that I needed. Here's before; here's after. It's really changed the image around. I feel like now there's more of just kind of a pool of light right in here that's really bringing my attention in.

Vignetting is nothing more than the darkening of the corners of the image, and sometimes you'll get a little edge darkening also, so what we've got is a darkening that's coming in like this. It's really just a big oval around the center of the image, or around the edges of the image. Here's another one. Seems like a perfectly reasonable shot, doesn't really need anything more. He's placed squarely on the third. I have this wonderful colored background. It's a nice, even background. My eye pretty well knows where to go.

But if I add a vignette, I go from that to that. Again, trying to keep it subtle, you may right as the change happens go, "Well that's such an obvious oval." Now look away from the image and look back, and you'll realize, "Well I don't so much see it as a darkening of the corners. I see it as, it looks like there's a natural shadow falling back here, and another one back here, and he's just kind of sitting in a pool of light." Again, before and after. I really think this image is made much, much better by the addition of that simple vignette.

Another one that's kind of similar, a strong object placed right on a third, nice colorful background, nothing really wrong with the image like this. But, it's just a little bit stronger, has a little more depth. Seems a little more 3D with the addition of the vignette. The vignette, by adding shadows here and there, gives me a change in the sense of depth and space in the image. This one's a little more obvious that it could use a vignette. I have this bright red fire hydrant here, which makes a nice subject, but I've got brightness up here, I've got bright stuff over here, this detail over here doesn't really add anything to the image.

And this one is so obviously about this area right in here that the addition of a vignette really brings attention where it needs to be. I think I could probably crop this here and here and get a stronger image, but again, before - after. The vignette really makes a difference. Vignettes work great on black and white images, also. Even though this image is so strongly framed by the light that's in the image itself, this bit here, which is what I was composing around, this is downtown San Francisco.

This is Chinatown in San Francisco, and I saw this display of light, and I just stood here and waited until somebody moved through it, because this is such a great framing device. But, it can be stronger with a vignette. Again, just a subtle one. Just a little bit of darkening to bring more focus to the center. I feel like part of the reason that vignetting works is the same reason that shallow depth of field works. Our eyes do not actually perceive complete focus through our entire field of view. Really, technically, the only part of our field of view that is in focus is an area about this big.

It's a very small area, and we have a strong dropoff in focus out to the edges. I do especially because I'm so near-sighted. Once things are outside my glasses, they're just a smear. So shallow depth of field really does create, in an image, something very similar to the way that we see in terms of focus. I feel vignettes do that with exposure also. In the real world, the way I see, I have a lot more attention up here, and somehow things just get more diffuse out here. They don't actually get darker, but I kind of have a sense that they do, that there's not as much light out here.

A vignette kind of replicates that. I'm going to apply a vignette now, so you can see exactly what I can do here in the way of controls. There are a lot of different ways of adding vignettes. In the old days of digital editing, meaning ten years ago, the way that you did a vignette was to carefully create a selection or paint a mask and then use a contrast or exposure control to darken the area within that selection or mask. Nowadays, we have vignetting tools built into different applications. Photoshop has one in the lens correction filter.

Lightroom and Camera Raw both have excellent vignette tools called post crop vignettes, and here's one right here in the effects panel in Lightroom. Post crop vignetting. This is the only vignette tool that you need, and this is really the one that I recommend over all others for a couple of different reasons. First, it is a post crop vignette, meaning if I crop the image, my vignette will travel with it. A lot of image editors, a vignette is applied before the crop stage in the work flow so you don't actually see the effects. I've got a few sliders here. Amount - If I go negative, the edges get darker. If I go positive, the edges get brighter, so I can create burn-in effects.

One thing you can use this tool for is actually eliminating a vignette if your lens is vignetting and you don't want it, you can use this to brighten the edges. So I'm going to just darken this a little bit. Like I said, I don't want the vignette to really be noticeable at all. If I really wanted to darken it, I could go here, and then you go, "Well, I really see the vignette. It's right here." But I can make this distance here, the feather from the dark part of the vignette to no vignette at all, I can make that wider by changing the midpoint here.

So you can see, I can change kind of the feathering, if you imagine this as a mask going around the image, I can change the feather on the mask. I've got some other tools. I can change how round it is. I can change the size of the feather itself to make it softer, and I can change how highlights get punched through the vignette, and we'll look at that again in a minute. So for the most part, I find I don't need to tweak these controls a lot. In fact, I'm going to just reset them, and in Lightroom, you can reset something simply by double-clicking on its name. I'll redo these.

I typically don't do a lot of customization. I'm just going for a very subtle darkening of the edges. Here's another one. One way you know... One way, if you're wondering, "Well how do I know when to use a vignette?" One way that you get cued in is you just look at the edges of the frame and go, "Is there information there that's really critical to the image, or is there brightness information there that's pulling my eye away?" I've got this big expanse of just empty space here that serves no purpose. I would really like more focus here on this terrifying squirrel.

So I'm just going to drop that down a little bit. Again, trying to walk the line between visible vignette and something that just looks like natural shadow. One of the great things about the post crop vignette tool is it works like a vignette on a real lens. On a real lens, a really bright spot in the corner of the lens will shine through the natural darkening of the lens. That's how post crop vignetting works. I've got the sun up here in the upper left hand side. I'm going to drop a vignette on here. I'm going to drop a really strong one so that you can see.

Look how much more vignetting I have here and here than I do up here. It's not as strong up here. Lightroom is very intelligently allowing the light in the corners to come through if it needs to, and I can adjust that more with this highlight slider. So I get a very, very realistic vignette, and what's nice about this is I really don't want darkening in that corner up there because it will make the vignette very obvious. So I can still keep my nice, subtle vignette here even though I've got a bright spot in the corner.

So as I said, I cannot stress enough how much a vignette will take an image that might be working just fine and make it work a little better. There are other times when I feel like I have completely saved an image compositionally by dropping a vignette on just to constrain the viewer's eye, keep it in place, and keep focus where I want it in the image. It's the post crop vignette tool in Lightroom, the same thing exists in Camera Raw. If you're in Photoshop, you want to go up here to the filter menu, and you're going to see lens correction here. It'll normally be active. And inside that, you're going to have a set of vignette controls.

They're not as intelligent as the Lightroom ones, but they still work in a pinch.