Vignetting is a photo processing trick that has been around long before Adobe Camera Raw made it popular. It’s the process of putting a dark or light gradient-like coloring on the surrounding edges of your image – think along the lines of dodging or burning the edges of your photo. It’s actually a really nice effect and can really set the mood for your shot or make a relatively average or boring shoot more dynamic. The problem with ACR is that it only gives you two colors for vignetting – black or white – and sometimes, it just doesn’t always work out very well.

So here’s a trick to try instead – do your vignetting in Photoshop. You can choose to sample a color from the photo and then put a stroke around the image (under the Edit menu) and add a heavy Gaussian blur to it, or you can use the image itself and set copies of the image to the multiply blend mode and then add a mask. (see examples below) Either method is effective and can take seconds to complete.

The point is, that if you use the colors in the image rather than just black or white, you will end up with a more natural, and complimentary vignette.