Comments on: Quick and dirty vignettes in Photoshop

By: Jugemon

Jugemon — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:15:43 +0000

I cannot use Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer to convert the image to black and white :/ Can’t find the right settings. Good there is other ways, too =)

By: ashley

ashley — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:40:53 +0000

picnik.com has vignettes you can add to any photo. and you can control the size, color, strength, etc. i’ve used them and love the results.

By: Audun

Audun — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:46:51 +0000

Thanks. Just the trick I was looking for!

By: Chad

Chad — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:13:08 +0000

Great tutorial, that's a neat way of doing it. I've been doing it basically as a hybrid of yours and mattymatt's.

I use the oval selection tool, feather the selection, and then use the quickmask to 'rough' up the selection (based on shadows and highlights in the picture) a bit so it doesn't look artificial.

By: mattymatt

mattymatt — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 23:48:24 +0000

A great topic. Another handy way to do this is to hit shift-M to switch the selection type to oval, then draw an oval over most of the image, then hit select/feather to blur the edges. Then hit select/inverse so that the corners are selected, and fill them in with a large black brush. Or you can copy those corners and then paste them as a new layer, and switch the blending to “multiply,” so the contrast looks more stern. And if you’re really fancy, you can convert to CMYK and then copy-paste just the black layer, which will give you extra-crispy shadows. Here’s how that sort of tomfoolery winds up looking: http://flickr.com/photos/mattymatt/tags/coronaheights/

By: Tim King

Tim King — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:56:35 +0000

That's a great technique, I've been doing vignettes in a similar way for years now.

As you said there are a million ways to do them, I've seen plugins that cost way too much and tutorials that take longer to read than to actually do them with this method!