Vignetting round a picture

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By John Sweeney - 16th of January 2007

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Vignetting round a picture.

You've seen those pictures where there is a good basic picture of some but it is ruined by lots of clutter around the picture. One of the cures for this is to vignette around it so that the part you want to stand out does so.

1. Open your picture.
   
2. Open the Elliptical Marquee tool on the toolbar (M on your keyboard)
   
3. Place the ellipse round the main part of the picture in the area you want preserving, hold the left hand mouse button depressed so that once you have the size you want for your marquee you can move the ellipse around the picture, to do this hold down the space-bar on your keyboard and move the ellipse around until you have positioned it where you want it, then release both.
   
4. Now, the area you have actually selected is the area within the ellipse so we really need to select the outside of the ellipse, to do that go to need to use the inverse tool, but, before we do that it might be an idea to add some feathering, so that the edges of our ellipse are not harsh.
   
5. Go to Select on the Menu-bar and select feather (Alt Ctrl D on your keyboard) and add some feathering, say 5 pixels, that should be enough, you can, of course add more or less as required.
   
6. Now we go back to select and this time select Inverse (Shift Ctrl I on your keyboard) and you will see the marching ants appear round the edges of your image as well as round the ellipse you have created. You are now ready to add a little vignetting or colour if you prefer.
   
7. Go to Image on the toolbar, then Adjustments and move the brightness slider to the right until you have achieved the desired result. At this point you can also desaturated the area in which the colour is to be added to make it more effective, all you need to do is move the saturation slider all the way to the left. When you are happy click ok on the pallet and it will close.
   
8. Now, hit Ctrl D to de-select and get rid of the marching ants.
   
9. Save the image (New Name or you original image will be no more).
   

That's all there is to it.