Adding a vignette to an image involves adding a subtle (or not so subtle) edge effect to it. A popular vignette technique involves darkening the edges of your image – it gives the image a slight border which helps keep the viewer’s eye in the photo. This is an effect which has been popular for years and which was is a feature of some classic film cameras such as the Holga (click to enlarge image below).
In the ‘good old days’, when we had finished the day’s photography, we would disappear into the darkroom and spend hours breathing in the fumes of nasty, smelly chemicals in the pursuit of our art, now we have Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop is the greatest programme known to man, well photographers anyway. Computers were invented just to run Photoshop. Every picture on this website has had some work done on it in Photoshop, even if it was just to get the size right.
This section of the site consists of a few tutorials for the absolute beginner covering such essentials as making your pictures the right size, getting the contrast right and getting the colour right.
These tutorials are not meant as an instruction book for using Photoshop they are designed to help you make better, more informed choices in your editing, whatever software you may use.
Although there are now photo library programmes that will adjust the size of your photo automatically when you select print, a little knowledge will put you in control of the process, enabling you to be much more precise.
When publishing photos on the web, it is best to make the photo the exact size, in pixels, that you need. This way the download time will be minimized. There is no advantage in having a greater number of pixels in the picture as they will not show on the screen and often the picture will have a strange ’squashed in’ look about it. Minimising the size of the file is not so important if you are just going to make a slide show for your computer or a CD but you will find the whole operation will be slicker and work faster if you do.
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Very often, when we upload our pictures to the computer from the camera and first look at them on the screen, they will appear dull and lifeless like photo No.1 on the right.
In this instance the photo is under exposed, often a problem when auto flash is used with a long lens, the flash is too far away from the subject to give the proper exposure.
Here are some suggestions for altering the brightness and contrast of the image in Photoshop, use them in the order that they appear, only move on to the next method if you are not getting what you want.
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Getting the colour right can be the most difficult part of photo editing but a little knowledge of how the colours are made will make this much easier. On the right we have a ‘colour wheel’ to help illustrate the concepts that you need to grasp.
All colours are made from three primary colours – red, blue and green. Forget what you learned in Art at school we are now dealing with light not pigments.
Where the three colours overlap in the middle of the colour wheel we get a neutral grey (somewhere between black and white depending on the intensity of the colours). I have faked it here slightly for the purpose of illustration.
Where two of the colours overlap they form other colours known as ’subtractive primary colours’. Another way of looking at it is that if you remove one colour from the middle of the wheel you will get a new colour. For example, if you remove red from grey you will be left with a mixture of blue and green, this colour is called ‘cyan’. If you remove or subtract green from neutral grey you are left with a mixture of red and blue known as ‘magenta’. Red and green combine to make the third ’subtractive primary colour’ – yellow. Knowlege of these six colours and how they relate to each other will enable you to correct any colour cast in a picture.
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