This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Effects Panel
The Effects panel in Lightroom allows you to add grain and post-crop vignetting to your images. Post-crop vignetting is a great feature when you want to add a specific focus to the center of the picture, but it requires a lot of care or you risk your image looking kitschy.
Let’s walk through how to use post-crop vignetting on a black-and-white image I was working on for a magazine cover, and then see how it can be overused and quickly go to the Dogs Playing Poker kitsch level (not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that is your intent) on a landscape image.
Open the lili-1.dng image in your Lesson 04 collection, and turn it into a black-and-white image. I added a Contrast amount of 39 to finish the image off.
This picture orginally was to be used for a magazine cover, so it needed a lot of headroom for the masthead and additional text. We won’t need that here, so use the Crop Overlay tool to get rid of some of that excess space and bring the focus back to the center of the portrait.
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Post-crop vignetting is an effect that evolved from the undesirable darkening in the corners of images taken using specific lenses. As a style, people started to like this effect of “burning the edges” in, as it drew attention to the center of the picture.
Lightroom introduced a Vignetting slider in the original release of the program that was supposed to be used to correct the effect, not add it. When photographers used it to apply a vignetting effect and then cropped their pictures, the vignette effect disappeared.
Lightroom has since moved the Vignetting sliders (to remove vignetting) into the Lens Corrections panel and added Post-Crop Vignetting (which retains the size and centeredness of the vignetting even if you crop the image) in the Effects panel.
There are three Style menu choices available under Post-Crop Vignetting:
Highlight Priority can bring back some blown-out highlights, but can lead to color shifts in darkened areas of a photo. It’s good for images with bright areas, such as clipped specular highlights.
Color Priority minimizes color shifts in darkened areas of a photo, but cannot perform highlight recovery.
Paint Overlay mixes the cropped image values with black or white pixels and can result in a flat appearance.
There are five sliders available to you under Post-Crop Vignetting:
Amount darkens the picture as you drag to the left, and lightens as you drag to the right.
Midpoint adjusts how tight to the corners the effect is created. A low number moves it away from the corners; a higher number moves it closer to the corners.
Roundness adjusts whether the effect looks like an oval or a circle. Drag to the left and it becomes more of an oval; drag to the right and you get a circle.
Feather adjusts how soft the effect transition appears. Drag to the right and the effect appears softer.
Highlights is available only when Highlight Priority or Color Priority are chosen in the menu. This slider controls the degree of highlight contrast that is preserved.
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Grain is a little more straightforward. You can control the amount of grain added to your image, how big the individual grains are, and how jagged they are. The grain looks pretty realistic and can add an extra punch to images, especially if you’re working in black and white.
This is a (slightly exaggerated) example of what you should avoid when working in the Effects panel.
Post-Crop Vignetting is always focused on the center of the picture. If you have items that are off-center, the look will not work well.
If you exaggerate the amount of vignetting, you should adjust the feather as well. If you don’t, the image tends to look like it’s lit with a flashlight, and it won’t have a lot of believability.
For as good as the grain is in Lightroom, overusing it can take away from the believability of the image.
If you are looking to offset the darkening of the image, as well as control things like shadows and colors, use the Radial Gradient tool.
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You now have a solid plan for working on images in your collections. You know how to make global and localized adjustments to your images, as well as save yourself a ton of time by synchronizing those changes across multiple images. In the next lesson, we’ll cover some common photographic problems and how you can fix them in Lightroom.
