Creating a custom, colorful vignette

In this movie, I'll show you how to create custom vignettes using lighting effects. Now some of you may have noticed that I'm using the same image for this chapter as I did when demonstrating the Radial Filter tool back when we talked about Camera Raw in the advanced course. And one of the reasons is, I want you to see how custom vignettes compare. In camera raw, a custom vignette is something you develop, that is, it's a kind of Adjustment layer. With lighting effects, It's a function of the lights you shine on the scene, and the shadows those lights cast.

So, for example, here's the original version of the photograph. Here's the lighting effects 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 on 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 the hue value of 30 degrees, a saturation of 25%, and I'll leave the brightness at 200% then I will click OK. And now I am 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 am going to reduce the ambien 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 complimentary 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 loose saturation inside the scene.

And now 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 onscreen because I had set the blend mode to overlay. And I'm going to change that right now by double clicking on a little slider icon. And I'm going to select the mode to normal this time around, and I'm going to leave the opacity set to 66%. Now I'll 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 the filter menu, and just choose the very first command, or you can press Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on the Mac. Because we're working with the smart object that brings back 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 line, because you may end up selecting one of the other spot lights 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 2.

And so then you can click on the Trashcan to delete it as well. Then you'll just left with one point light. And this time, I'm going to take the intensity up to 40. Otherwise, I'm not going to change anything. I'm 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.