Effective photographers utilize various means to narrate an engaging image to their viewers, such as controlling light. A good composition should guide the eye through an image. One method they may employ to achieve this is through light control.
Vignettes can be an extremely powerful and straightforward method of storytelling. Plus, it’s simple!
What Is a Vignette? A vignette can be defined as the reduction of an image’s brightness or saturation around its edges compared to its center, creating a visually unbalanced aesthetic. Vignettes may naturally occur with certain lenses such as wide aperture lenses; or can easily be created post-processing.
Create Vignettes With Adobe Lightroom Classic
Above, there already appears to be some vignetting in the original photo; however, my main reason for brighter subjects was by lighting up their car grille while taking their photo; everything else became slightly underexposed as a result.
Lights in the distance create visual interest around its center, so I placed the brightest part of the sky directly over the highest part of the car grille for maximum effect.
Create Vignettes in Lightroom Classic
Under the Effects panel are controls for post-crop vignetting. Chances are you already understand how it works – play around with these controls until you find something you like!
I find that for most applications, just a minimal amount of vignetting is sufficient to give your photos some visual interest and draw your audience’s eye away from something obvious; subtlety is key here; here, the amount is just minor.
I have also increased the feathering, which controls how gradually a vignette darkens over time.
See how straightforward that was? Involve heavy-handed vignetting and feathering to complete this simple step.
Just for fun, I thought it would be interesting to create an extreme example of vignetting. You’ll notice that both the Amount slider and Feathering slider have been drastically adjusted leftward compared to their normal positions; this gives an abrupt, sudden transition from light to dark gradations which might work with certain photos but most likely won’t.
Vignette controls could already be on your phone!
No need for Lightroom, Photoshop, Luminar or Affinity when creating vignettes – chances are high that they are already accessible through photo editing features on most phones!
Check your phone for any vignettes similar to what I have displayed here – for instance, iPhone Photos apps offer this functionality easily.
Light to the Subject Subconsciously, viewers’ eyes gravitate toward brighter and more colorful areas in an image. Vignettes can help photographers direct this gaze toward these parts by adding subtle light effects around a subject. Furthermore, this effect almost frames or frames an image for our viewing pleasure.
What kind of photos could benefit from using vignettes? Portraits? Sports? Birds? Wedding? Fine art?
Next time you view photographs, observe if the photographer has used vignettes to direct light directly at their subject.