Creating a custom, colorful vignette

In this movie, I'll show you how to create custom vignettes using Lighting Effects. So, unlike the vignetting controls in, say, Camera Raw, which are pretty limited, you don't have control over the color, for example, over the vignette and it's always centered. Whereas, with Lighting Effects, you can move the light source anywhere you want. So, you can have non-uniform degrees of darkness in all four corners of the image. So, for example, here's the original version of this photograph. Here's the Lighting Effect we just applied. And here's the Lighting Effect we're going to apply in this movie. So, you can see just how flexible this filter really is. I'll back up to the results of the previous movie and I'll double-click on Lighting Effects here inside the layers panel in order to bring up the big window.

And you can either throw away your existing spotlights or you can just turn them off. So, I'm going to just turn off each one of them. And with both lights off, the scene is going to turn black, obviously. Now you want to go ahead and add a point light by clicking in the Add New Point Light icon up here at the top of the window. And I'm going to drag this point light to right about there at the tip of her nose. And I might scale it ever so slightly. I want it to be about 643, something along those lines.

And now I'm going to change the color of my point light by clicking on the white swatch. And I want to warm up the scene quite a bit here. So, I'm going to dial in a Hue value of 30 degrees, a saturation of 25%, and I'll leave the brightness, say, up to 100%. Then I'll click OK. And now I'm going to take that Intensity value up to 35 in order to produce this effect here. Now, we need more darkness associated with the background. So, I'm going to reduce the ambient value here to negative 50, this time around.

But that gives us a lot more orange. And I actually want to counterbalance the ambient light for the point light, so I want to make it cool. And so, I'll do that by clicking on this little blue color swatch. And then, I'll change the Hue value to 30 degrees this time, so you can see we're getting the opposite complementary color. And also notice, by the way, if I reduce the Brightness value to 50, I'm actually brightening things up. Because, since I sent the ambiance to a negative value, as a result these options are producing the opposite effects. And I'm going to take the saturation down to 50 as well. And in this case, we do actually lose saturation inside the scene. And now, I'll click OK in order to accept the result. Now, I'm going to leave the other option, set as is. And then I'll click OK in order to apply that modification to my image. Now, I'm seeing a different result on screen because I had set the blend mode to Overlay and I'm going to change that right now by double-clicking on the little slider icon.

And I'm going to set the mode to normal this time around. And I'm going to leave the opacity set to 66%. Now click OK. Now, I still want to enhance the lighting further and I'm going to do so using a second application of Lighting Effects. So I'll go up to Filter menu and just use the very first command or you can press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F on the Mac, because we're working with a smart object that brings the window. At this point, notice that the first spotlight is selected even though it's turned off, which makes it kind of difficult to select the point light because you may end up selecting one of the other spotlights instead. And if that bothers you, then you can just delete these guys. And you do so by clicking on one of the spotlights and just clicking on the trashcan in the lower right corner.

And that will automatically select spotlight two, and so then you can click on the trashcan to delete it as well. Then, you'll just be left with just one point light. And this time, I'm going to take the intensity up to 40. Otherwise, I'm not going to change anything. going to stick with the previous settings. And I'll click OK, just to create a second application of that filter. Now, double-click on it's slider icon over there on the right hand side. And this time, switch the mode to overlay, as before. And I'm going to reduce the Opacity value to 50% in order to produce this effect here.

Then go ahead and click OK. And that is how you create a custom vignetting effect using the Lighting Effects filter.