Add a Cool Vignette Style to Your Photos
In this tutorial, I show you all about styling a photo. There are many ways you can style a photo in Photoshop, and this is just one of them. Some of the effects that I use in this tutorial are “Vignetting”, which consists of creating a dark edging around a photo. This can give photos an antique look, but in this example, it draws the focus on the girls in the photo.
The marquee tool is used to create the vignette. We simply select the part of the image that we want to be visible, and we feather our marquee. In the video I set the Marquee feathering to 80px; though I’ve found that 100px works very well too. Much lower than 80px and you’ll get a much more solid edge and it looks more like a border than a vignette.
I also rely on the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer again to draw attention to the subject. And we use Layer Masks to block out the portions that we don’t want desaturated. Another nice trick is that you can duplicate a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and block out different sections on your layer mask so that each adjustment layer controls the color of a particular part of the photo.
Lastly, we use a new trick to “Sharpen” our photos. Don’t overlook Sharpening; its like polishing brass and it really makes the difference between a decent photo and an amazing photo. I show you how to use the High Pass Filter with the Overlay Blend Mode to create your sharpen layer. The change is very slight, but the results speak for themselves.
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