 today I want to talk to you about your photograph. In particular I want to talk to you about adding a custom vignette to your photograph. Now if you've never heard the term vignette before or you don't know what a vignette is the general concept of adding a vignette is that we want to darken the edges around a photograph therefore leaving the center a little bit brighter than its surroundings and therefore drawing our attention a little bit more to the center of our photograph. The theory behind this is that our eyes have a tendency to look for the brightest part of any image so if we artificially enhance the brightness value of the center by darkening down the outer part of the photo our eye is naturally going to look to the brightest part which now becomes the center. Another way that I kind of look at this is to me a vignette should have two parts it should have an outside and it should have an inside and it's really the power to be able to manipulate both the outside and the inside that works for me. So there's a couple of ways that you can add a vignette to a photograph there's one way that's built in to the lightroom program naturally and I'll show you that technique but there's something about it that I don't like first I don't like that you can't edit the inside of the circle you can only edit the outside of the circle that's problem number one problem number two is that as photographers we don't always put our subject matter in the center of a photograph in fact we usually frown upon the fact that a subject is dead center in a picture so the way the vignetting feature inside of lightroom works doesn't really make a whole lot of sense so what I'm going to do is show you how the lightroom version works and then my favorite way of adding a vignette which will give us not only the ability to edit the center but also the ability to manipulate where the vignette is placed in the event that your subject is in a rule of thirds or off center or something like that so let's jump into lightroom and show you exactly what it is I'm talking about first I'm going to show you the vignette feature that's built into lightroom you'll find it in the developed module under the effects tab and when you go to effects you'll see right here that there is a post crop vignetting and there's a few things that you can adjust in here first you can adjust the amount so what I like to do is just take the amount and drag it all the way down to a negative 100 percent it's going to be way more than you need but this will at least allow you to see exactly what the other adjustments are doing then you can back off the amount to your desired you know what you desire later so let's go ahead and drag the amount all the way down you'll notice that you can also add a white vignette in here I'm not really sure what you would use this for I think of babies or maybe glamour shots you ladies know about glamour shots back in the 80s all right we're going to add the amount negative 100 then you'll see that you have a midpoint here so you can make the center of this bigger or smaller you also can change the shape of this vignette whether you want it more square or more round and then you can also change the feather so it gets a little bit softer if I bring this all the way down you can see that's a really sharp edge that's not really appealing I'm not sure where you would use that usually if I'm going this direction I'm going to add a nice soft feather to this and then highlights will try and protect any of the bright stuff in here I really don't find it works very well so I hardly ever use it so once I dial in my midpoint roundness feather the last thing to do is go back to the amount and and back it off a little bit to a desired a desired amount the way I look at this is I just start to back it off until the photograph looks more natural and then once I'm done I stop if I toggle this switch on and off you can see that a vignette has been applied even though it's not very strong but again as I said before the thing that I don't like about this is that I don't have the ability to maybe brighten the center a little bit more drawing even more attention to that area and I don't like that I can't move this completely off of center so what do you do in that situation here's the trick we're going to use a radial filter to do this so I'm actually going to turn this effect completely off as if we've never added a vignette before and what we're going to do instead is we're going to head up to the radial filter and we're going to apply a new filter so we're just going to click and drag and I can move this anywhere that I want which is one of the problems that we had so if your subject matter is completely off to left right up or down that really doesn't matter I can move it anywhere that I want to another thing that I love about this in the theory of customizing is that not only that I can move it around but if the orientation of my subject is a little bit more at an angle I can change that as well by hovering outside of these pins here and I can actually turn or rotate this so that it's a little bit more in the direction or in the angle of my subject matter in this case you could see that this swan the way its neck curves around is a little bit at an angle so I'm going to prefer to kind of move this into that same natural angle that my subject matter is so once I've applied the circle I can start to make any adjustments that I want to this for example I can go here and darken down the edges I can even increase the feathering here just like we could in the other one and I can alter this even after the fact by making this maybe slightly a little bit bigger and if I turn this on and off you can see how just the outside edge of this photograph is being affected but I said that the second problem that I had was that I wanted to add something to the middle of this photograph and I can do that right here right now and it's very easy to do all you're going to do is hover over the pin for the radio filter that you've applied you're going to right click on it and you're going to duplicate this pin now when it duplicates it it's going to leave this pin exactly on top of the other one so if you were to leave this photograph and come back to it you know two or three weeks from now you may have forgotten that you've duplicated this pin so a word to the wise take this pin that you've just duplicated and just scoot it over a little bit it doesn't need to be far but just enough so that you can notice that there are actually two pins being placed here that's going to save you a lot of headache in case you forget weeks or months from now the next thing you want to do is you want to invert this selection so that it's affecting the inside of the circle not outside of the circle so we can do that by clicking this invert button once we do you'll notice that now this effect is affecting the middle if i move this around you can see exactly what it is i'm talking about the next thing i'm going to do is reset everything because what it's doing is it's actually applying the adjustments from the first radio filter and i don't want that to happen i want this to be completely different from those other effects so what i'm going to do is hover over the word effect double click on it and that will reset it and the last thing that i'm going to do here is now i can adjust the middle of this to be exactly what i want so maybe i pull the highlights up but in particular i'm going to pull the exposure up and you can see how that makes the center of this photograph much much brighter and i can again adjust the circle if i want this to be a little bit softer maybe add a little bit more feathering to it so on this one i've made the center brighter i could always go back to the other radio filter and make that even darker drawing even more attention to those areas i'll maybe lift the shadows a little bit so this is this is way more control i can move it move it all around i can change the angle i can make the outside darker the inside brighter there's tons of things that you can do with this but this is way more customization and a way better way of vignetting than the built-in version so hopefully you like this tip i use this way all the time um photograph to me most of the time isn't complete unless i think it has been added that's just my opinion so uh use it enjoy it likes comments subscribes are always appreciated thank you so much for watching my name is adam i'm out