Vignettes are an important part of your photograph because they help you to direct the viewer’s eye to where you want them to be looking in your photograph. Perfectly Clear Complete has a great tool to help you in creating the perfect vignette quickly and easily.
To add a vignette to your photograph in Perfectly Clear, the first thing you’ll do is to turn on the Graduated Filter section. You do this by clicking on the small circle to the left GRADUATED FILTER (see below). Be sure you have Shape selected.
Now let’s take a look at the original image. I had Perfectly Clear process the RAW file.
Built-in vignettes
Now let’s take a look at the built-in vignette options we have. You can see we have five basic vignettes.
Let’s see what those look like with their default settings on the same photograph. Click on one of the images to enlarge it and then you can move through all the images at the larger size. It’s much easier to see the difference at the larger size.
Controlling the vignette
Now let’s look at the controls you have available to change these default starting places. Starting with the Shape section, you want to select the left image (see blue outline below). You can also use the Place Center button. To use it you click it and click anywhere on the image to place the center of the vignette.
Next, we can control the shape of the vignette with the Shape slider. When you click on the slider button and drag it right or left, the image will change and look like this. The vignetted area is shown in red. When you drag to the left or negative the vignette becomes more vertical. When you drag right or positive, the vignette becomes more horizontal.
The Size slider changes the size of the vignette area. The feather slider feathers the vignette area and looks like this starting default, them maximum feather and minimum. You can see that feather softens the vignette from the edge toward the center.
Finally, the Rotation slider allows you to rotate the vignette to your liking.
INSIDE <-> OUTSIDE the vignette
The other area you can control the look of the vignette is by changing the parameters in the INSIDE <-> OUTSIDE section of the Graduated Filter. In this example, I have selected the Heavy Portrait Vignette and just below the Rotation slider below, you can see that OUTSIDE is selected. Here you can see that the outside of the vignette is effected by Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows and Saturation because their checkboxes are checked and changes have been made to the sliders. You can also see there are many other parameters you can change in the screenshot below.
You can also change the characteristics and look of the area INSIDE the vignette by clicking on the INSIDE button and it will give you the same set of options to choose from as the OUTSIDE. The Center Boost vignette uses INSIDE.
So here’s the final image with the Heavy Portrait Vignette selected:
Perfectly Clear makes it amazingly fast and easy to add and fine-tune vignettes for your photographs. It allows you to use the default settings as well as giving you a vast number of parameters that you can change to make it look the way you want. If you haven’t yet, give it a try!
