My favorite trick for adding drama to an ordinary photo is to give it a vignette effect. If you’ve seen old black and white photos, you’ll sometimes notice the corners are darker than the rest of the image. It’s usually undesirable. But done purposefully and tastefully, vignetting can give an image added interest, depth, and focus.

There’s a million techniques to make vignettes in Photoshop, but I’m most fond of the quick and dirty way. Here’s how to do it in three easy steps:

1. Use a large soft paintbrush

The key is to use the paintbush tool set with a large and soft brush.

• Set the brush size to at least half the width of the image. For example, if your picture is 2,000 pixels wide, your brush should be at least 1,000 pixels.

• Set the hardness to between 0% and 20%, depending on how soft you want your vignette.

Your brush settings should look something like this:

2. Paint around the edges

On a new layer, use the paintbrush to paint black edges around the image. As you paint, make sure at least half of the brush is off the canvas. Otherwise, the edges of the vignette will be way too deep:

To give you a better idea of how to paint the edges, here’s what the painted layer looks like without the image layer beneath it:

3. Adjust the edges’ opacity

The final step is the lower the opacity of layer with the painted edges to about 60% or to your liking. Here’s the final result:

Some variations

Sepia

Use Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer to convert the image to black and white and then use Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter to apply a sepia tone:

Fade to white

Instead of black, paint on the edges using white as the foreground color. Then, lighten the main image a bit using Image > Adjustments > Levels:

Wasn’t that easy?

Thanks to Scott of Punchcut for the photo of his daughter, Audrey.