Vignette?

[TimArruda]

Hi All,

This is my first post here. I've been lurking on and off for some time. I would say I am more or less a beginner with Photoshop, and am working with Photoshop 7. I have an old picture of my Mom's grandparent's from the Netherlands that I have been working on. The picture was not in bad shape to begin with so it has not been that hard up to now. But(you knew a but was coming, right?) it had been cut into an oval shape and placed in a frame. My mom inherited it when my grandmother died, and I was able to scan it. As you can see, it is not a perfect oval. I have pretty much finished the repair work that I wanted to do to it, and what I would like to do to finish it is to have it as a nice oval vignette on a white background.

I figure I have two options. I can crop it smaller to create a nice smooth oval vignette, or I can fill in to leave the photo as is and create the vignette. I like the photo as is and would prefer to fill in. For the life of me I have not been able to figure out how to do this. I had first used the oval marquee tool and created a nice oval selection that I would like to use as the borders of the vignette. From there I have been stumped.

I tried inverting the selection, and then created a new layer, which I would use as a frame per say. My plan then was to go to the background using the lasso tool create selections that I could copy onto a new layer and then move into place. For various reasons that did not work well. First, the oval selection I created has blank space in some areas, but cut off the picture in others. When creating the frame, the areas that were cut off would be copied to the new layer. I also wanted a border that was easily visible when copying and placing clones from the original to fill in, and could not figure out something that worked for me.

Sorry to go on so long, but I'm starting to go crazy here!!

http://www.ywhrc.org/images/MomGrandparents.jpg

Thanks,

Tim

[KenB]

Is this at all close to the results your looking for? If so, all I did was create a oval selection aorund the subject, inverted it and feathered it about 12 pixels and filled with a color sampled from the image. I did add a little noise also.


Ken

[catia]

Tim,

I know you said that you did not want to "crop" the photo any, but I did anyway just to see how it would look. This was done by selecting an oval area with the Elliptical Marquee Tool and then running the Vignette action that comes with PS7. I used the default feather of 5 pixels. Took all of five minutes.

Just remember Tim, sometimes better is the worst enemy of good enough.

Catia

[TimArruda]

Sometimes simplicity is looking you right in the face, and ya just cant see it. Thank you both Ken and Catia, both of those solutions would work for me. When I used to program applications as an independent consultant, my mantra was "keep it simple." In this case I just couldn't help myself and did not follow it. LOL

After posting, I went back and looked at it again, did end up cropping it more than I wanted to orginally, then only had a tiny piece to fill in which was relatively easy. Here are the results.

I like both of your's better, but I am happy with what I ended up with. I always enjoy asking other people for their take on a problem. I am always pleasantly surprised at the alternate solutions that come up with different takes on the problem.

Thanks,

Tim

[LactoBeeZor]

Welcome Tim;

Ain't this group the best....

[T Paul]

Not sure if I understood you, but this is what I did.

1. Select the Elliptical Marquee tool.

2. Drag a marquee selection around the area of the photo you want to keep. I used the alt command so I could drag the marquee oval from the center out until I had a nice oval that pretty much encompassed the entire image.

3. Just a few areas were left empty in the process of trying to save as much of the image as possible, but at the same time still create a nice oval. I used the healing brush to fill in the white spaces and match the background creating a perfect oval. If you don't have the healing brush you could also use the clone tool.

3. Finally I applied PhotoShop's default vignette action around the selected oval.

An alternative way to do this is:
1. Select your image and place on it's own layer
2. While image is still selected, click the "Add layer mask" button at the bottom of the layers palette.
3. Click on the layer mask thumbnail in the layers palette.
Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and make sure the Preview option is checked.
4. Adjust the radius until you are happy with the amount of fade and click OK.

I used a radius of 25 for this image...

[T Paul]

Looks like a few others had the same idea and posted as I wrote mine

[Jakaleena]

I just used the Vignetting Tutorial in the tutorial section

[TimArruda]

Thanks for everyone for their help and suggestions. I look forward to my next project. I have a bunch of old family photos and am creating an area in my house filled with pictures of my family through the generations...

Tim