Add vignettes using Photoshop in 6 simple steps

In photography vignetting, or light fall-off, is the loss of brightness at the borders of an image and it is a lens characteristic or weakness.

Usually vignettes are not desired however it is not uncommon to add them during post-processing for example to draw the attention of the user to a particular portion of the image or to give it an aged look.

I am going to show you how to add vignetting to your image using Adobephotoshop in just a few simple steps.

1. Open the image you want to add vignettes to in Adobe Photoshop
   
2. Select the Lasso Tool (L) or the Elliptical Marquee tool (M)
   
   
   I usually prefer the Lasso Tool since it is more flexible and allow to draw irregular shapes.
3. Select loosely the portion of the image you want to draw attention to
   
4. Feather generously the selection
   Right click inside the selection you’ve just made and click on Feather
   In the Feather Radius box input a big number and press enter.
   
   N.B.:Basically here you will have to experiment a bit to see which numberfits your picture but the general rule is that the higher the resolution the bigger the number.
   For a high-resolution picture start with 100 pixels
5. Inverse selection by right clicking inside the selection and click on “Select Inverse”
   
6. Add a Levels layer (Click on image for higher resolution)
   
7. Darken by pulling the central point to right till you are satisfied with the results (Click on image for higher resolution)
   
   If the transition is not smooth enough to your liking go back to step 4 and pickup a higher number as Feather Radius

Final image

photoshop tutorial

This post is a guest post by Lara Zankoul.

I’ve always been attracted to the tones of Lara’s pictures so I tried to talk her into sharing with us her retouching techniques and here goes her first tutorial.

1. Crop to your liking
I started with a well exposed & bright pictured and did a a square crop

2. Changed the color balance
Using Image – Adjustment – Color Balance I used the below values

3. De-saturated the picture
The next thing I did was de-saturating the image using Image – Adjustment – Hue Saturation

4. Apply : Image – Apply (Multiply 10% to 30% depending on image)

5. Variations (toward Red) – Image -> Variations

6. Add new layer and fill it with this color : #133e9f

7. Then Apply the picture again (10% to 30% – Multiply)

8. Add new layer and fill it with this color : # 0b0871

9. Play with curves and saturation to get a nice faded tone:

10. Apply image OR fix contrast to get the final picture: