Vignetting

[yardkat]

Hi everyone,
I watched Ctein's great webinar on Saturday, and since then have been reading through tons of posts here and learning a lot. I was really inspired by the show, and really hope to get a lot more proficient at retouching.

I have this photo to work on that has vignetting due to the flash of the camera. I had this great idea about how to correct it from Ctein's webinar, but now I can't remember exactly how to do it. I think he evened out tones like this using curves and working on the curves layer mask, but my notes are not good enough and I can't quite get it figured out. If anyone has a suggestion I would love to hear it.
I haven't yet done any corrections on this image. To be honest, the flash circle doesn't really bother me too much, I like how it imparts the feeling of amateur snapshot, and the fact that it's lighter around the subjects draws your attention there anyway, instead of to the expanse of wall, but I would still like to minimize it, and learn how to correct it the right way. I'm also not above cropping, but I would like to learn.
I have Windows 7 and CS4. I hope I get the photo uploaded right!
Thank you all in advance!
Julie

[philbach]

Hi Julie

There are several ways to attack the problem. For example you could go to lab mode and work with it there. But to work with this photo in RGB mode, adjustment layers and layer masks almost have to be used.

1.) The first thing that I did was to use levels on each color channel. RGB.
2.) Placing Color Samplers on the white lampshade and mothers dress (white part) will help.
3. Next I used a stack of adjustment layers to deal with the various problems of luminosity and color. Using a gradient on the layer masks helped localize where the correction should occur.

Is this picture corrected. Well I guess its better but perhaps this will give you a start

[Britsdad]

yardkat,

Thought I'd have a go with this one too, hope I got the colours about right.

The layers tell the story really, if you have any questions just ask.

John

[yardkat]

Those both look fantastic! Thank you so much, can't wait to have a try at this myself! I want to get better at and feel more comfortable with masks, I think doing this will help a lot. Thank you so much!

[tom60634]

The vignette's real problem, to my eye, is the purplish rose discoloration.

I seperated the file into color and luminous layers as described in Richard Lynch's " The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Layers Book".

I then adjusted the color layer with the Hue Saturation adjustment layer to get the file close to believable. I masked out the parts that were incorrectly adjusted.

Levels were used, then curves for the final edits.

Don't know if the colors are close to correct, but the file does seem more correct as a photo.

[Kraellin]

nice job, britsdad

[Britsdad]

Why, thank you Craig :-)

John

[jeremy1986]

Here's what i got playing around with it

[chillin]

A selective color adjustment would help. A setting - one fits all doesn't work.

[yardkat]

Thank you for your thoughts, chillin!
@Tom60634, I just bought that book, so hopefully I'll be able to learn some more tricks.

I hope to be able to work this file a bit this week...my PS time is short usually, so it takes me forever to get any work done. *sigh*