How to Vignette Your Digital Photos

The vignette effect is an attractive and elegant look to give to your digital photos, and is achieved by smoothly blending the photo against a single-colored background.

This effect works best on portrait photos - though there is nothing stopping you from trying it out on any type – and has been used by photographers as far back as the early 1900s.

1. First Things First

Before we get started it is a good idea to choose the photo that you want to vignette and create a copy of it to work with; this is a simple safety measure to make sure that you don’t make any permanent changes to the original image that you didn’t intend. Now that you’ve created a copy of your photo go ahead and open it in your preferred image editor – I've used Jasc Paint Shop Pro for this article, but most of the widely used editors can create the same effect using very similar techniques.

2. Cutting Out the Subject

The first step taken to vignette a digital photo is to cut out or select the subject from the rest of the image, and this can be accomplished using the selection tool in your image editor. Most photos using the vignette effect use oval or rectangle shapes, and while these may provide the best results it does not mean that you can’t experiment with others.

First choose a shape that you like and then proceed to set the feathering level – this is what will cause the picture to blend into the background smoothly. A quick rule of thumb is that the larger the photo is, the higher the feather level will be. Start off at around 50 and then experiment to find the number that gives results that you prefer.

Next, it is time to cut out the subject – using the selection tool create your preferred shape at an adequate distance around the subject, and once you are happy with the size proceed to the next step.

3. Removing the Background

Now we need to invert the selection. If you are using Paint Shop Pro then click Selections > Invert on the menu bar; other image editors will have a similar method to invert the selection. What this does is reverse what we just selected - instead of having the subject selected we now have everything other than the subject selected!

The next part is very simple – press the delete key and watch as you are presented with your vignette photo. All that is left to do is to crop the background a little if desired, then your vignette photo is complete!


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