iffles.com

The Boots Photo entry brought up a good question from haikalaziz who wanted to know:

hey ive noticed some of your pictures have the dark blurry border around the picture(photowalk 47 fallen on the trail). im just wondering how do i just get that without affecting the picture like this boots picture.

So I thought I’d take some time today to show you how I make that dark blurry border – also known as a vignette – in today’s entry.

Of course, there are a few different ways to do this, depending on the exact effect you want at the end. Since haikalaziz asked specifically about the dark blurry edges of the Boots photo, I’ll start there first, but first let me show you the photo I’m going to use for all of the tutorials:

Pronounced dark edges of the photo

The first thing you want to do for this is to select the inner portion of the image – the part that you DON’T want to be darkened. The key here is to make sure that you have the “Feather edges” option selected and, if you’d like, the “Rounded corners” option as well:

As you adjust the rounded corners radius value, you’ll be able to see in your selection what that looks like, but the Feather edges you can’t see until we use the fill tool later on, so you might have to do some guessing and checking – the value is in pixels, though, so how big you want to make it will depend on the size of your image. I was happy with values of right around 35 for each of mine (I started with an image that was 1024 pixels wide).

I just eyeball it to get all the edges about same size. Partly because I’m lazy, but mostly because I haven’t found a better way to do it – if I select the whole photo and then do Select –> Shrink to shrink the selection, I seem to lose the rounded corners and feathered edges in my selection. *shrug*. Anyway, my selection looks something like this now:

Now, create a new layer (either click the white piece of paper icon at the bottom of the Layer tray, or go to Layer –> New Layer, or hit Ctrl+Shift+N). Be sure to pick a Layer Fill Type of Transparency. Now do Select –> Invert. You now have the outer edge of the image selected instead of the center of the photo. Now, select the Fill tool (the one that looks like a bucket), and fill in your selection with black. Because you have a feathered edge to your selection, it will fade towards your selected area instead of being solid – like so:

You have two options at this point to make it a bit more subtle. You can switch the blending mode to Overlay, or you can keep the mode at Normal and just decrease the Opacity. When you switch to Overlay, any white part of your image will remain white (like the upper right corner of this image), so I stuck with Normal and dropped the Opacity to about 25, and this was my final image:

Note that we can use the same technique with the Ellipse Select Tool:

And with the Lasso Select tool:

In all of these photos, though, the darkness is rather pronounced – which sometimes is exactly what you want. If not, though, read on!

A More Subtle Approach

This time we’re going to start with a duplicate layer of our background and add a layer mask. I covered Layer Masks, and what exactly they do in the smoothing skin tutorial, but a quick recap: if you paint black on a layer mask, it will make that layer transparent there. To add your layer mask, right click on your duplicate layer and select Add Layer Mask.

Now select your blend tool (the one that looks like a gradient) and make sure you’ve got a black-to-white gradient, change the shape to radial, and bump up the Offset. The idea here is that you’re going to make part of the image darker than the rest – you’re using the gradient to fade into the darker image – the higher your offset, the more of your layer mask will be white – meaning that more of the photos original lightness will be visible.

Now, draw a line from where you want the middle of the gradient to be, to where you want it to end. I want to make sure the entire front of the car is involved in the gradient, so I draw my line like so:

And… it looks like nothing happened. Well, that’s because your layer mask layer is identical to the layer under it. But if you look at your layer mask now, you’ll see it has the gradient in it:

Now, in the Layer tray, click on the actual photo part of the layer with the mask. We’re going to darken it now, and we want to make sure we’re darkening the PHOTO part of that layer and not the MASK. To darken it, go to Colors –> Levels and move the left-most slider to the right, as we discussed in the levels entry. My final image looks like this:

For easier comparison, here’s the original:

When you look at the image with the vignette, it’s not really obvious that there’s one there. It’s not until you look back at the original that you can really tell there’s a difference. I think that might be why I typically prefer using this type of vignette. Of course, you’ve seen my photos and know that I sometimes use the more pronounced edges, too, so I don’t think either one is “right” or “wrong”. Go ahead and play around your images to see which looks best on them!

Related posts:

1. Gimp Quick Tips: Part Two This was not the entry I planned on writing tonight...
2. Gimp: Some quick tips The Gimp is a very powerful piece of software and...
3. Smoothing Skin in Gimp Hey look! I’m not breaking a promise! I told you...
4. Adding a Watermark in Gimp (via a Script) A lot of people want to protect their images on...
5. Adding a Texture in Gimp What’s the first thing you notice about the above...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.