Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [100]
2.
In this example, I used the Lens Corrections panel to compensate for the vignetting. I set the Amount slider to +28, and adjusted the Midpoint to fine-tune the correction. The aim here was to obtain an even exposure at the corners of the photograph.
Effects panel
Post Crop Vignetting control
A lot of photographers have got into using the Lens Vignetting controls as a creative tool for darkening or lightening the corners of their pictures. The only problem here is that the lens vignetting can only be applied to the whole of the image frame area. However, you can also use the Post Crop Vignetting sliders to apply a vignette relative to the cropped image area. This means you can use the Lens Vignetting controls for the purpose they were intended (to counter any fall-off that occurs towards the edges of the frame) and use the Post Crop Vignetting sliders in the Effects panel as a creative tool for those times when you deliberately wish to lighten or darken the edges of a photo via Camera Raw. The Post Crop Vignetting Amount and Midpoint sliders work identically to the Lens Vignetting controls, except in addition to this, you can adjust the Roundness and the Feathering of the Vignette adjustment.
Combined effects
Now that we have Post Crop Vignetting controls as well as the standard Lens correction vignette sliders, you can achieve even more varied results by combining different combinations of slider settings, whether a photo is cropped or not.
1.
In this first example I applied a−70, darkening vignette offset with a+45 Midpoint setting. This adjustment was not too different from a normal Lens Vignetting adjustment, except it was applied to the cropped area of an image.
2.
In this next version, I adjusted the Roundness slider to make the vignette shape less elliptical and adjusted the Feather slider to make the vignette edge harder.
3.
For this final version, I applied a +70 vignette Amount to lighten the corners of the cropped image, combined with a low Midpoint and a soft Feather setting.
Post Crop Vignetting style options
So far I have just shown you the options for the ‘Paint Overlay’ vignette style option. It wasn't named as such before, since this was the only Post Crop Vignette mode available in the previous Vignettes panel. When first introduced, some people were quick to point out that the Post Crop Vignetting wasn't exactly the same as the Lens Correction vignette effect. You can see for yourself in the Figure 3.54 example how the Paint Overlay vignette applies a soft contrast, hazy kind of effect. This wasn't to everyone's taste (although I didn't particularly mind it) and so Camera Raw 6.0 now offers you two alternative post crop editing modes which more closely match the normal Lens Correction edit mode, yet offer extra scope for adjustment. Where people were once inclined to use the Lens Correction sliders as a creative tool (because the Paint Overlay post crop effect was a bit wishy-washy), they should now think of the Lens Correction sliders as being for lens corrections only and use the Post Crop Vignetting sliders to add different kinds of vignette effects. So let's now look at the new post crop options.
In the Paint Overlay mode example ( Figure 3.54 ), the post crop effect blends either a black or white color into the edges of the frame depending on which direction you drag the Amount slider. The two new ‘Priority’ modes produce an effect that is now more similar to the Lens Correction effect since the darkening or lightening is created by varying the exposure at the edges. Of the two, the Color Priority ( Figure 3.55 ) is usually the more gentler as this applies the Post Crop Vignette after the Basic panel Exposure adjustments, but before the Tone Curve stage. This minimizes color shifts in the darkened areas, but it can't perform any highlight recovery when you darken the edges.
Figure 3.54 In this example I took a photograph of some snow-covered tree branches. Shown here is the before version (top) and one where