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Vignette

Chris and Lee

A vignette is a part of an image, often a face, made into an oval (usually) and faded at the edges; the term also refers to the edge-darkening you get on long-exposure photography caused by the greater amount of light focused at the centre of the film-plane.

Original image (scaled)

• Load your image. Use this one if you like. Click on the Scissors icon, then Copy (two rectangular outlines).
• In the Copy window select Feather and change to about 24 pixels.
• Now click on the Pencil tool. Select the solid ellipse icon and draw an ellipse around the part of the image you want to vignette (click on the cross and redo if you get it wrong).

  

  Feather to 25, use the solid ellipse tool

• You can now drag this ellipse to wherever you want -- open a blank canvas and drop it in there, for instance. Don't forget to click on the Tick when you're happy! Alternatively, type Ctrl-C to put it on the clipboard.

Notes

• Adjust the Feather value to suit. You have to do this before you make a selection; you can't change it afterwards.
• If you need to use the vignette again, once you've made the selection open the Copy window menu, and go to Selection>Save to>#4 Alpha. You can now recover the selection later by choosing Copy>Selection>Load from>#4 Alpha, and it will be remembered if you save the file (in a format that knows about alpha channels, of course - TIFF or Photoshop are best).
• An alternative method is to use the selection directly as a mask. Save the selection to an alpha channel as just described, then invert the channel (Channel window, drag and drop the channel name to the Invert icon). Fix. You may find you get a smoother effect by applying a largish gaussian blur to the mask, by editing the alpha channel directly. Then set the channel as the mask, and fill the image with colour.
• To make the image at the top of this page, I first created a blank canvas and filled it with black, then dragged the oval selection into it.
• To make the above picture illustrating the process, I used a similar technique but used the solid curves icon and drew round the relevant parts of a screen grab.