This post is your 7th opportunity to enter Digital Photography For Moms’ contest to win a free copy of Photoshop Element 7/Premiere Elements 7, courtesy of Adobe! See details at the end of this post.
Vignettes often are the finishing touch in a refined and professional picture. They bring focus to the subject of the photo and can hide flaws or distractions in the background.
Luckily, vignettes are easy to create in Photoshop Elements! There are countless ways to create a vignette – you’re bound to find one that suits your shot perfectly!
6 Types of Vignettes in Photoshop Elements
- Easiest Vignette - Use the CoffeeShop Free Vignette Action!
- Subtle Vignette- Use the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee Tool to select the central portion of your photo and invert the selection (Shift+Control+I). Apply a high amount of feathering (75 – 150 pixels maybe). Copy this selection to a new layer and change the Blend Mode to Multiply.
- Basic Vignette- Press D to set your colors to Default black and white and make sure that black is the foreground color. Use the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee Tool to select the central portion of your photo. Invert the selection (Shift+Control+I). Apply a high feather (try 75 – 150 pixels again). Create a new layer and fill the selection with black (Alt+backspace).
- Variation on Basic Vignette - Instead of black, sample a color from your image or use a complimentary color to fill the vignette with. Midnight blue works nicely sometimes! Or the green from my daughter’s Christmas pajamas:
- Gauzy Vignette – Use a Marquee tool or make an exact selection of the subject of your picture, invert (Shift+Control+I), feather just a bit, copy the selection to a new layer, and Gaussian blur the bejeezus out of this layer (Filter Menu/Blur/Gaussian/20-50 pixels).
- Adjustable Vignette- Create a new layer and fill it with 50% gray (Edit Menu/Fill Layer/Contents Drop-Down Menu). Change the layer’s Blend Mode to overlay. Use a soft round brush at medium to high opacity to darken corners, edges and other less important parts of your image.
Remember that you can adjust the layer’s opacity to make the vignette more natural with any of these methods.
To enter the Digital Photography For Moms Photoshop Elements 7 giveaway, use the comments below share your vignetting ideas or opinions. The drawing for the contest will be Monday, December 22 and you can enter once on every post I’ve made during the month of December.
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