| Photoshop Tutorials » Design » Vignette |
A vignette is portrait style photo, illustration or artwork where the edges fade into the background without a definite border. It's a great effect for drawing attention to and highlighting the subject of the artwork, portrait or photograph. Vignettes are also a very easy effect to achieve with Photoshop. There are many vignette tutorials on the web, however I don't think you'll find any that are easier than the technique described here.
I recently learned a new way to vignette and (this may sound dramatic but true) my life has changed. My photos no longer have that THIS PHOTO HAS A VIGNETTE look that's so obvious. It's imperfect like real vignettes are, the transitions are smoother, my life is filled with sunshine and rainbows. LIFE CHANGING.
Here's an effect that I use quite often with my own photos to bring more attention to the main subject of an image or just to give photos a little more warmth and personality. Once you see how easy it is to create, I think you'll find yourself using it as much as I do. We're going to learn how to darken or burn the edges of a photo, creating a vignette effect, and we're actually going to create the effect using a filter in Photoshop that was designed to remove such a "problem" from an image. In Photoshop CS2 (you'll need Photoshop CS2 or later to complete this tutorial), Adobe introduced us to the Lens Correction filter. This filter's main purpose is to help us remove common problems that can be created by camera lenses, such as barrel distortions, chromatic aberration and vignetting. It's a great addition to Photoshop's ever growing collection of photo editing tools, but there's no rule that says you have to use Photoshop the way the folks at Adobe intended. As we'll see, the same filter designed to remove dark edges from a photo also happens to be a great way to add them!
Thanks for the comment, Avangelist. This one was purposely filed under 'Basics' at the request of one of my readers, a completely new Photoshop user who wanted the fastest, simplest way to create such an effect. However, you list some great ways to achieve a more advanced version!
2. Hide your background layer. Click the visibility eye in the layers palette to hide it,
7. Click ok on the curves window
