Create a Custom Vignette in Lightroom With This Easy Technique

Applying a vignette to your images is an excellent technique for emphasizing a subject by making it appear brighter than its surroundings. There are many ways to create one, and you don’t need to be a post-processing guru to succeed.

The standard way of creating a vignette is by using Lightroom’s Post-Crop Vignetting tool. This is a mistake. The results become significantly better when you make a custom vignette in Lightroom.

The Post-Crop Vignetting tool might be convenient but it lacks several critical elements to make the ideal vignette.

Keep reading, and I’ll show you my go-to technique for creating a custom vignette in Lightroom. I use this technique for most of my images, and it only takes a few simple steps to create.

Why Lightroom’s Post-Crop Vignetting Tool Isn’t Good Enough

If you’re familiar with vignettes and use them for your images, you’re probably also familiar with Lightroom’s Post-Crop Vignetting Tool. Most of us, myself included, started creating vignettes with this tool and felt pretty content.

There is one major downside: it’s extremely limited in how the effect is applied.

What do I mean by this?

The Post-Crop Vignetting Tool only allows you to make adjustments outside the vignette, and the center isn’t movable.

The main purpose of adding a vignette is to direct attention towards the main subject of your photo. This subject isn’t always ‘dead center’. In fact, compositional rules such as The Rule of Thirds suggest not to center your subject.

Another important yet often overlooked aspect of using a vignette is that you don’t always want it to affect the entire photo. For example, it’s contradictory to darken naturally bright areas entering the frame from a corner and lighting up the scenery.

The solution is to create a custom vignette using masks.

Create a Custom Vignette in Lightroom Using Masks

The good news is that creating a custom vignette in Lightroom isn’t much more complicated than using the built-in sliders. I’m certain you’ll get the hang of it after a couple test runs.

Here’s how:

Start by activating the Radial Gradient (Shift+M) and creating a new mask/selection by clicking and dragging it on your image. You can modify its shape and size by pulling its edges until they cover the subject you wish to highlight and some of the space around it.

Make sure to leave some space between the inner and outer line to make the gradient softer. This will give the vignette a more natural look.

Directly below the Feather slider, there’s a box named Invert Mask. By selecting this option, we tell Lightroom to invert the selection and apply the adjustment outside the radial mask.

Next, lower the Exposure until you have a gentle vignette around your image. Avoid making the vignette too visible as it might attract too much attention.

Alternatively, you can use the other Tone sliders instead of Exposure. I use the Exposure slider for most photos, but in some cases, using a combination of the others gives a more pleasing result.

Note: Remember that you can change the size and shape of your Radial Gradient mask at any later point if needed.

Brighten the Inner Vignette

The second great benefit of creating a custom vignette with this technique is that you can adjust the center of the vignette. I often prefer increasing the exposure slightly on the insides to enhance the focus on this area further.

Right-click on the small icon in the center of your active filter (the outer part of the vignette) and select Duplicate Layer from the dropdown menu. This creates an exact copy of the filter we’ve already made, including the shape and adjustments.

Duplicating the layer has made the vignette even darker. To apply the adjustment to the center of the photo, we need to uncheck the Invert option.

Pull the exposure slider a little towards the right until you have an exposure of +0.2 to 0.5 or wherever you find the effect to be best.

That’s it! You’ve now created your first custom vignette in Lightroom. It wasn’t that hard, was it?

Bonus Tip: Intersect Masks to Further Refine the Vignette

The vignette you’ve just made is already significantly better than what you can get with the standard Post-Crop Vignette Tool. However, seeing that we’re working with Masks in Lightroom, we have one more major advantage: you can intersect masks to refine the selection further.

This allows you to remove the vignette from unwanted areas or add it to areas inside the radial selection.

To refine the mask, follow these steps:

1. Create the vignette as explained in the previous steps.
2. Select Mask 1 (the mask that affects the outside of your vignette)
3. Click on the – (minus) icon below the mask thumbnail (alternatively, you can control + click, or right-click, on the thumbnail) and select Brush from the dropdown menu.
4. Now click and paint on the areas you want to remove.

Take the image above as an example. In that case, I don’t want to darken the areas around the setting sun. Naturally, this is a brighter part of the frame, and I want to enhance this by darkening everything but that.

In the mask that we’ve created, we’ve applied a natural vignette that doesn’t affect the naturally brightest area.

Summary

As you can see, creating a custom vignette in Lightroom isn’t as difficult as you might think. You’ll quickly get the hang of it when going through these steps a couple of times.

The big advantage of making it manually is that you have much greater flexibility regarding how and where the vignette is applied. You’re not limited to just reducing the exposure; you can reduce highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, or pretty much anything else you’d like.

By intersecting the masks, you can target the selection even further. Which again helps emphasize the effect of your vignette.

To summarize, this is how you create a custom vignette in Lightroom:

1. Open the Radial Gradient tool (Shift + M) and invert the mask
2. Click and drag on the image to make it the desired size and shape
3. Use the Exposure slider to lower the exposure of the vignette
4. Duplicate and uncheck the Invert mask option
5. Increase Exposure, Shadow, or Whites to brighten the center

Now that you know how to make a custom vignette in Lightroom, I challenge you to play around with it to see how it affects your images. Leave a comment below to let me know how it worked for you!

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