Infratech Civil

Product:  Adobe Lightroom Classic  |   Subject: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic

In this exercise, we will learn about Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adding Post-Crop Vignetting & Grain Effects. 

In this section, I want to share how you can use Lightroom to add a couple of effects that may give your images a little bit more impact or a little bit more oomph and make them a little bit more inviting to the viewer. The effects that I'm talking about here are in the effects panel here in the develop module. I'm going to go ahead and open it up. You'll notice that we have three areas within the effects, we have post-crop vignetting, we have grain, and we have dehaze. 

I already covered the haze in another section, and in this section, we're going to cover these two post-crop vignetting as well as grain. Once again, these are effects, and they are entirely subjective to how you want to interpret the image or how you want the image to be interpreted. 

Let's talk about vignetting; vignetting is about either darkening or lightening the edges of your image. Now there are a few styles that you can use. The first style is highlight priority. 

In this style, vignetting is going to take all of the edges around your image, and it's going to focus on those highlights to ensure that they're even. But when you use highlight priority and exaggerate this vignetting, you might have some color aberrations. That is maybe not what we want. You might have the fringing of a particular type of color on edge. 

Let us choose the color priority to ensure that we keep most of the colors the same. You will notice that there are a few sliders within the post-crop vignetting. Once we adjust the amount slider, the other sliders become open to us as well. So let me go ahead and move the slider to the left. You will notice that the vignettes are darker around the edges, and they slowly come into the middle. If I move it to the other side, all the vignetting will be white, and it will be faded out on the edges. I'm going to keep it like that on the right-hand side so that I have a white vignette. I'm leaving this exaggerated because I want to show you what it looks like on the screen. 

The next slider to adjust is the midpoint. You can see the changes happening as you adjust them in one way or another. There's no midpoint. It's mostly the entire image. But if we move the midpoint out and out, you'll notice that the vignette is just on the corners. So let's leave it somewhere in the middle that we think works well. The roundness slider determines how round this vignette is. To show you let me just adjust the midpoint, and I'm going to drop the roundness. And the more I drop the roundness. You'll notice that it becomes rectangular. The more I increase the roundness, the more circular it becomes. I'm going to go ahead and make it just a bit rectangular because it's a little more fun. 

Finally, we have the feather. The feathering makes the edges either very defined or very soft and blending into the rest of the image. If we drop the feather down, it's a very hard edge. If we increase the feather, it's a very, very soft edge. Right now, I like this look that I have. It looks like an old photograph that you know I found in grandma's shoe box. 

This is a photo of grandma that you know she made when she was young. So once again, because of this effect, you're going to create a story. This story has meaning and value to you. Ultimately, this is the story that you want to import to your viewer. 

The invitation, of course, is to understand what you're trying to evoke in the viewer. One thing I want to point out is that this is post-crop vignetting. This is important because these vignette effects will be applied after the cropping has been done. Sometimes, you may or may not even crop your image. But if you do crop your image, you will notice the vignette will be applied to the image after all the cropping is done. 

So just to illustrate that, I'm going to open up the crop overlay tool. Then, I'm going to choose the 4 × 5 ratio because this is a nice portrait. I'm going to adjust it, and you'll notice our previous vignette was around the extreme edge, but when I choose done or hit Enter, you'll notice the vignette applies itself and redraws itself to work with the new crop. 

Finally,  let's just scroll down and adjust the amount of grain that we want in this photo. Once again, the story that I'm sharing with you is a photo of grandma that I found in the shoe box. And it's telling me a story about grandma. So, there's a whole effect here that is being applied to the image. You may not see it, but I'm going to zoom into the photo here just to show you what the grain effect looks like. 

The more I increase the amount, the more grain there will be in the image. But I think the green at 100 is a little too much. I will drop it down just enough to give me that aged look that I'm going for. The size is about the size of the actual grains themselves. You can probably see this more if I exaggerate this. You'll notice how the size of the actual grain is much larger. 

So I'm going to drop it down, and you'll notice that the grain size is much smaller. So let me undo those couple of changes and keep it where I think it is appropriate. Then finally, the roughness of the grain is how rough it will show up on the image. I've exaggerated to 100. So you can see just really how rough it is. 

When I drop it, you'll notice that the grain is there, but it's an interesting effect. This is probably an effect that goes well with the older developed films. 

That's it for post-crop vignetting and for adding grain to your images. Once again, these are subjective effects. These are aesthetic effects that will create a story that impacts the viewer about that image.