Vignette Effect
Vignette effect for images and video: darken, whiten or fade the edges to transparent, in a round or squarer shape. Exports stills, MP4 and transparent WebM.
What is a vignette in photography?
Vignetting is when a picture darkens toward its edges and corners. Lenses do it on their own, since light falls off roughly with the cosine-fourth law away from the center, and hoods or filters can block the corners outright.
Photographers also add one on purpose, with a lens, a filter or in post, to keep the viewer's eye on the middle of the frame.
How to add a vignette to a photo
Amount is how far in from the edges the effect reaches, and Feather is how soft it is, anywhere from a hard edge to a long fall-off. Roundness sets the shape. At 1 you get an ellipse that fits the frame, and at 0 it follows the rectangle.
Colour is what the edges fade to, which is black by default. Tick Transparent if you'd rather they fade to nothing.
You can start from Classic, Subtle, Heavy, Rounded rectangle, White fade or Cut out.
Settings for a portrait, an old print, a cameo and rounded corners
For a portrait, use Subtle (Amount 0.25) with Feather and Roundness at 1. The darkening starts well outside the face and is too gradual to read as a shape, but it still pulls the eye inward. For an old print, try Amount 0.8, Feather 0.5, Roundness 0.6. That's a quick, squarish fall-off like a cheap lens, and a sepia tone from the Color Effects hub finishes it off.
For a cameo, turn Transparent on and set Amount 1, Feather 0.3, Roundness 1. The picture fades out between about 70 percent of the way to the edge and the edge itself, giving you an oval portrait for a card or a web page. For rounded corners, use Transparent on, Amount 1, Feather 0, Roundness 0.1. It cuts the frame along a curve just inside the edge, and you're left with a thumbnail that has rounded corners on any background.
Super 8 Film Effect has a simpler vignette built in, mixed in with its grain and faded color.
What shape does the vignette follow?
The edge follows a superellipse, the Lamé curve that sits between a rectangle and an ellipse. Roundness slides its exponent from 10 at 0, which is almost a rectangle with soft corners, to 2 at 1, a true ellipse. So the darkening can hug the straight sides of a wide frame or close in as an oval.
Why is the vignette oval when I wanted a circle?
Roundness 1 is an ellipse that touches all four sides of the frame. On a 16:9 video that's a wide oval, and you only get a circle on a square picture. For a round vignette, crop the picture square first (the Image Tools hub has a cropper).
With Transparent on, nothing gets darkened. The edges fade to see-through, and you'll only notice once the file sits over something else.
Saving a vignette with transparent edges
A transparent vignette needs a format with an alpha channel. That's PNG or WebP for a still, and WebM with transparency or a PNG sequence for a clip. JPG and MP4 have no transparency, so the faded edges lose it.
A dark vignette over a smooth sky is a gradient, and 8-bit files band those easily. If you see steps around the edge, add Film Grain Overlay at a very low Amount before saving.