Vignetting in Photography

Embrace the edges and unveil the artistry of vignetting in photography...

What is vignetting in photography?

A vignette is on a photograph when it has darkened edges. A vignette can make your photographs stand out and draw your audience’s eyes toward the center of the photograph.

There are several different types of vignettes, such as optical, mechanical, pixel, and artificial. However, not all images look great with a vignette. You can remove the vignettes from your photographs in post-processing or while processing them.

You just need to understand what type of vignetting you’re dealing with and adjust your equipment accordingly to remove the vignette during processing.

You can artificially add or remove the vignette through editing software such as Lightroom.

Vignetting is an interesting phenomenon associated with photography. You should understand what it is, its causes and types, whether it’s effective or not, and how to avoid it in your photographs.

Vignetting can be sudden or slow in any photograph, depending on the type of vignetting and its cause.

A vignette has multiple causes related to lens type or focal length. However, some photographers also intentionally use vignettes in their photographs to draw the viewers' attention toward the center of the photograph, like in a profile image.

What does a vignette do to a photo?

In most cases, a vignette gives a photograph a black or grey-black border around its edges or corners. The border can appear gradual with shading around the borderline or abrupt with a concise and clear circle.

A vignette helps to bring the viewer's focus to the center of the image or the central object in the photograph. It helps to remove the lines or objects in the corners that might distract the eye from the center.

A subtle vignette is a great tool to subtly draw your viewer’s eye to the object near or around the center of the image without cutting off or blackening the corners as a hard vignette does. Vignettes are often used to add a retro or vintage look to photographs.

This is because old cameras produced pictures with a vignette because of the quality of the machinery and other factors. Hence, retro is often associated with vignetting.

What causes vignetting?

A vignette can form due to the equipment used, such as the lens, lens hoods, filters, and even the focal length of the camera.

If your camera is set to a short focal length, there is a greater chance of a vignette forming. The lens type of your camera can cause a vignette. For example, a Telephoto produces a large and sharp vignette, so lens type matters.

It can also result from wrong camera settings or too many filters on top of your camera lens. Here are all the factors that cause vignetting:

1. Lens design

The design of the camera lens itself can cause vignetting. Some lenses may not distribute light evenly across the entire image sensor or film plane, resulting in darker corners and edges.

2. Lens aperture

Vignetting can be more pronounced when using wide apertures (e.g., f/1.4, f/2.8) because the outer portions of the lens may not transmit light as effectively as the center. Narrower apertures (e.g., f/8, f/16) often reduce or eliminate vignetting.

3. Lens attachments and filters

The use of certain attachments, such as lens hoods, lens caps, or stacked filters, can intrude into the lens's field of view, blocking some light and causing vignetting.

4. Sensor size and crop factor

Cameras with smaller sensors (like crop sensors or Micro Four Thirds cameras) may experience more noticeable vignetting when using lenses designed for larger full-frame sensors because the lens's image circle may not fully cover the smaller sensor.

5. Physical obstructions

Anything physically obstructing the front of the lens, such as a lens hood, your hand, or even a poorly positioned lens cap, can cast a shadow on the image sensor, leading to vignetting.

6. Post-processing

In some cases, photographers intentionally add vignetting during post-processing to draw attention to the center of the frame or create a specific mood.

7. Lens characteristics

Some lenses are intentionally designed with vignetting to create artistic effects, such as the "swirly" bokeh of certain vintage lenses.

Types of vignetting

There are several types of vignettes, and some are caused by the equipment you use. You can also purposefully add a vignette to your photograph with Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or other editing software.

1. Optical vignetting

Also known as lens vignette, this type of vignetting is related to the lens aperture size and the number of elements the lens has. In large-aperture lenses, light doesn’t reach the corners of the sensor because the lens barrel prevents light from entering.

Moreover, with more elements, the light intensity gets reduced by the time it reaches the sensor, like in a rectangular sensor, and this will lead to darkened corners and a vivid center in your photographs. Different lenses produce different degrees of vignetting, but the best lenses for a subtle vignette are Prime and ultra-wide-angle lenses.

2. Mechanical vignetting

Mechanical vignetting, also called accessory vignetting, occurs when filters, filter stacks, and other such accessories are used.

In smaller aperture cameras, mechanical vignettes can be prominent in an upsetting way.

Wide-angle camera lenses often have a lens hood. This lens hood is there to prevent ghosting and flares in your images. These lens hoods can cause vignetting to an extent, but only if you use a third-party lens hood instead of the camera’s original lens hood.

Original lens hoods are specifically designed for that particular camera lens, so they don’t lead to vignettes in pictures.

Camera lenses are designed with some Slack to allow photographers to mount filter hoods onto the camera, and these filters help add vignettes to your images. If you want a vignette in your pictures, you can rent and test out a couple of filter hoods and filter combinations and see if they offer what you want.

3. Pixel vignetting

Also called digital vignetting, the pixel vignette is a result of the design of digital cameras.

They have a flat, rectangular sensor and a curved lens. The light hits the sensor’s pixel in the center at 90-degree angles and the corners or edges at slanting angles. As a result, the image has darkened corners.

Increasing the focal length of the lens (decreasing the aperture size) cannot remove or reduce a pixel vignette. This is because this vignette results from the angles at which light enters the camera lens.

4. Artificial vignetting

In some types of photographs, the effect of vignetting can appear pleasing to the eye and can act as an invisible guide to lead the viewers across the image or where you want them to look.

To get a vignette in photographs, photographers often leave it during processing without removing it afterward. You can intentionally create a vignette by combining filters or other effects.

If you want a vignette instantly added when you snap a shot, you can adjust the camera lens setting and test out a couple of filters to find the desired effect. Otherwise, you can use editing tools to add a vignette.

How to fix vignetting?

While subtle vignettes can make your photographs pop, vignettes might not suit all photographs. To make them pleasing to the eye, you can remove or avoid them altogether. Vignetting can be corrected or reduced using various methods, both in-camera and during post-processing. Here's how to fix or reduce vignetting:

In-camera solutions

Change Aperture: Vignetting is often more pronounced at wider apertures. Try using a narrower aperture (higher f-number, like f/8 or f/11) to reduce the effect.
Remove Filters: If you're using multiple filters stacked on your lens, removing some or a thinner filter can help reduce vignetting.
Lens Hood: Ensure that you're using the appropriate lens hood for your lens. A properly designed lens hood can reduce stray light entering the lens and causing vignetting.
Zoom or Prime Lens: If you're using a zoom lens, sometimes vignetting is more pronounced at the extreme ends of the zoom range. Adjusting the zoom can mitigate the effect. Prime lenses may have less vignetting compared to zoom lenses.
Crop Mode: Some cameras offer a crop mode (often called "DX" mode for Nikon or "APS-C" mode for Canon) that reduces the image area used by the sensor. This can effectively crop out the vignetting, but it also reduces the image resolution.

Post-processing solutions

Lens Profile Corrections: Many post-processing software tools, such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, have built-in lens profile corrections. These tools automatically detect the lens and apply corrections for distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.
Manual Corrections: If your software doesn't have automatic lens profile corrections, you can manually correct vignetting using tools like the Graduated Filter or the Radial Filter in Adobe Lightroom or similar tools in other software. These tools allow you to brighten the corners and edges of the image selectively.
Vignette Correction Filters: Some image editing software has dedicated vignette correction filters to reduce or eliminate vignetting. These filters often allow you to adjust the strength and shape of the correction.
Clone and Heal Tools: In some cases, you can use clone and heal tools to manually correct vignetting by copying and pasting areas of the image with even lighting to the corners and edges.
Exposure Adjustment: In some situations, simply brightening the entire image slightly can help reduce the visibility of vignetting.

Is vignetting good or bad?

Vignetting can be good or bad depending on what type of picture you want and the subject of your image.

Photographs with an object in the center, e.g., profile pictures or other types of images, don't suffer much from vignettes because they make the viewers focus more on the center of the photograph, which is what the photographer wanted in the first place.

However, for landscape photographs or architectural images, where you want the viewers to see the entire picture and all its components, a vignette will render the edges black and cut off the image the photograph was supposed to represent.

While a subtle vignette is a great way to lead your viewer's eye across the photo, not all photos need one. Most photos will look great with just light editing, etc, so always plan out and decide if the picture looks great with a vignette or without it.

One good way to check is to compare the original photo and the photo with a vignette. You can choose to leave the vignettes in your photographs depending on what type of picture they are in and whether the vignette suits them or not.

If you don’t want a vignette, you can engineer your camera's equipment to remove it or use editing software to remove it or crop it out from the image. Vignetting is a helpful phenomenon when used right, but it can make a professional look like a rookie in the eyes of your audience.

It’s best to be vigilant with vignettes and choose carefully whether your photograph needs one.