How to Put a Simple Vignette on Your Photograph in Photoshop

There is more than one way to put a vignette on a photo in Photoshop. Some are pretty complex, really more work than is needed for a simple vignette. I will show you the easiest way that I have found.

1. Open your document in Photoshop. Once you have completed all of your initial editing (levels, color correction, etc..) and flattened and existing layers. You will be ready for the vignette, I always do it as the last step of my work flow.

2. You will want to select your marquee tool in the tool palette. You can use either a rectangular or an elliptical marquee tool. They do pretty much what they are named, the rectangular will be square and the elliptical will be round.

3. You will then need to place your cursor on the upper right hand corner of the photo. You can make the vignette thicker or narrower by starting your start point closer to the edge or farther into the photo. When you decide where to start your vignette at, you will left click and hold it down as you drag down and across the photo. You will want to drag the selection line (marching ants) until it is pretty even on all sides. Again there is no right or wrong, just whatever looks good to you. Once you get it where you want it, you can let off the left mouse button to see the selected area. If it looks good you are ready to proceed to the next step.

4. You will need to set the foreground color in your color palette to the color that you want the vignette to be. Once that is selected then you will go to your SELECT menu at the top of the page, when the menu pulls down you will select FEATHER. Here you can select any amount of feather depending on how wide you want the vignette to be. I usually use around 80 to 100. That gives it a very nice fade into the picture. Once you have the fade completed, you will pull down the SELECT menu again and click on INVERT.

5. You are almost ready to see your beautiful vignette. The final step is to press the DELETE button. Depending on the version of Photoshop that you have, you may or may not need to select foreground or background color. On CS4 and above it will prompt you to make that selection. Once you click your selection of foreground, the vignette will appear.

6. Final step is to save your work.

This is a very simple process, but can really add some pop to your photos.

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