Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

While there is a Vignette panel in Lightroom 1 it was intended to be a correction tool for fixing the slightly dark edges around a photo that can result from using certain combinations of filters and lenses. It worked OK for that purpose, but many people enjoyed using it more as a creative tool to add a darkening (or lightening) effect to the edge of some photos. The only problem was that Lightroom 1 only applies the vignette to the outer edge of the source photo, so if you also crop that same photo in Lightroom 1 you risk cropping away the vignette effect as well. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 remedied that problem with a significant enhancement to the Vignette panel that added new controls for creating “post-crop” vignettes strictly for creative purposes. Let’s take a look.

The Vignette panel in Lightroom 2 contains two sets of Vignette controls:

Lens Correction: This section works just like the controls in Lightroom 1, which are intended to correct an actual vignette problem. The effect is only applied to the outer edge of the original photo, but not the cropped version.

Post-Crop: This is a new set of controls that are strictly for creative purposes and will automatically be reapplied after any subsequent cropping is performed.

In this tutorial I’d like to specifically focus on the new set of sliders in the Post-Crop section.

There are four sliders in the Post-Crop section of the panel:

• The Amount slider controls the amount of vignette you can apply to the photo. A positive amount lightens the vignette and a negative amount darkens it.
• The Midpoint controls how far into the middle the vignette effect extends. A Midpoint of 0 applies the vignette amount as far into the middle as is possible.
• The Roundness slider controls the shape of the inside edge of the vignette effect. The higher the Roundness setting the rounder the inside of the vignette effect will be, with a +100 setting equaling a circular vignette effect.
• The Feather slider determines how soft the vignette effect fades into the middle. A setting of 0 means no fading (or softening) of the effect, while a +100 setting is the maximum amount of fading from middle (lightest) to edge (darkest).

Let’s take a look at an example photo where I’ll add a creative vignette that is more like an interesting white border effect.

Starting with all sliders set on their default amounts the photo looks like this:

Let me walk through the steps I took to add a white border.

Step 1.

Since I wanted a white border then I need to apply the maximum positive Amount setting of + 100.

Step 2.

I don’t want any fading at all in this effect so I set the Feather slider to 0.

Step 3.

I want the shape of the inside of the vignette to be as rectangular as possible so I set the Roundess slider all the way to -100.

Step 4.

The final step to get this effect is to adjust the midpoint slider to the point where the border is wide enough to suit your taste. I liked the look of setting it to 10.

I like the look of that effect and will sometimes add it to photos in a slideshow as a way to create a double border and offset the photo from the slide. Of course there is a wide range of effects you can achieve with various combinations of settings on those sliders.

Here’s the cool part. Even though I’ve finished adding that border I can still correct the crooked horizon without losing my vignette. If I press R to jump to the crop tool I can quickly straighten the photo, which will result in some cropping by default. Note: Once you move to the Crop Tool the vignette effect will be hidden until you exit the Crop tool.

After straightening the photo I press D to apply the crop and my vignette affect is reapplied to the newly cropped and straightened photo.