I was out the other night judging a competition at a local
camera club. I've done it a couple times
a year for the past several years. It's
typically a fun night and we (the other two judges and I) usually get into some
good natured wisecracking along with serious the constructive critiques. The people in the leadership of the clubs
tend to say they like the lighter atmosphere.
Some people who judge are just too dour for my taste. The club I was at last week is one I'm often
asked to as a judge. It seems every time
I go I ask the members to put a vignette on their images. To have a beautiful image or print where the
color just slides off the edges just makes me nuts. It may come for when I first started out in
photography. It was at a camera
club. The more experienced members would
really get on my case if a print didn't have a very subtle vignette on it. Today's image shows different degrees of
vignettes. To find out which one was
used on the final image (on the right), hit the "Read More".
First lets go through the series from left to right. The far left is a solid hole punched into the
shot. Unless you're going to put the
image into an oval frame we can pretty much eliminate it from consideration as
something you might use as a vignette.
* In each case the vignette would be applied by putting the
outer portion of what you see on a separate Layer in Adobe Photoshop CS6 (or
any other version) and changing the Blend Mode to whatever works best for
you. Typical good choices would be
Overlay or Multiply. In both cases
Opacity can be used to fine tune the amount to produce a very subtle effect.
**The three center images have different levels of
feathering. It would be dumb to give
specific numbers of pixels for the feathering without stating the dimensions of
the original image. I grabbed an old
image that had been formatted for printing as a small sized print. The dimensions are 1500 pixels wide and 2250
pixels high.
The second image from the left has a 100 pixel feather. You can see that quite a bit of the outer
edge of the image is visible. There may be some images that can take this
heavy a vignette. A stylized portrait
might work, but not too many landscapes.
The middle image has a 200 pixel feather. There's less of the hard image left. The fade goes almost out to the edges, but
the corners still have a lot of information.
This is getting closer to what would make a good vignette. It's important that the vignette doesn't
dominate the image. The idea is to work
on the subconscious portion of the brain.
You don't want people says "oh, there's a vignette on this
image", but you do want to hold their focus to the part of the overall
shot that you want them to look at.
Image four has a 300 pixel feather, Only the tips of the corners have the full detail
of the image. The center
"spot" is very small by comparison and should be at the center of
interest. There's nothing that says the
vignette must be symmetrical. If the
object you want the viewer to concentrate on is off center, the vignette should
be off center. You would have to be
careful. One side of the vignette might go
right off the side (or top or bottom) of the frame. In that case you might have to go back in a
paint in a little darkening at the smaller side of the image.
The last image is the finished image. It does have a vignette applied. Can you tell which version of the vignette
was used? There are all sorts of ways to
add a vignette. This is only one
way. Punch a hole in a Layer. I typically like to use a Layer Mask. You can get the same effect but also have the
advantage of being able to uncouple the Layer Mask from the image Layer and
move the spot around to wherever you need it.
I can easily think of a dozen ways to apply a vignette. The one thing to remember is to use a
vignette to "finish" the image.
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