Make Your Images More Effective With Carefully Crafted Vignettes

An image with flat light can come across as forgettable and boring. Make your images more powerful and effective by shaping the light and guiding the eyes of the viewer to where you want them.

Photographer Jimmy McIntyre shares some of his photography and editing experience with the rest of us in a new series called "Ask Jimmy." The premise is simple: you email in questions you might have, and he picks one to tackle in a video.

The first question chosen to answer was the number one tip McIntyre would offer anyone to get better post-processing results. His answer, as you can see by the title, is using a vignette. This is not where you simply darken the corners with the kind of vignette you might be expecting. The tutorial is made for Adobe Photoshop users, but the concepts could apply to any software.

I find McIntyre's videos enjoyable and informative. Do you use vignette in your images? I used to always apply some at the corners, but now, I tend to do exactly what McIntyre is suggesting, but in Adobe Lightroom with the Radial tool. It is always fun to learn new techniques and tricks to take your images to the next level. If you are looking for more tutorial videos, be sure to visit the Fstoppers Tutorial Store.

Michael B. Stuart's picture

Michael B. Stuart is a photographer at Stu Stu Studio in Lewiston, New York. Besides shooting weddings with his wife Nicole his specialties include long exposure, abstract monochrome creations, architecture, and bokeh. Work has been featured online by Adobe, Flickr, Google, and 500px with the most popular photo receiving over 950 million views.

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