Secondaries with the Pros - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 210

“They think it's just darkening the edges. My idea of a vignette is:
I don't want you to see it. I'm using it as an option like a DP would. I'm
using it as a lighting tool. That's what I consider vignetting.” Pepperman
continues, “Being able to help isolate your eye towards the specific prod-
uct, person, or whatever you want in the picture. So that's why I use it all
the time. I use vignetting on everything that I do in my commercial work,
whether it's a square or a circle, or whether it's a shape that consists of
a combination of shapes. (DaVinci lets you combine geometric shapes in
a variety of ways.) I always do it because when I look at a picture, I'm
always trying to help what I'm looking at. If I was working on a picture of
a beautiful mountain landscape, I would do the same thing. I would try
to isolate, vignette the sky, and bring it down or the ground and bring it
up. I'm just always using it because it's just such a powerful tool for the
colorist. Why wouldn't you?”
Vignetting the Ultralight Flyover Scene
Craig Leffel, of Chicago's Optimus, demonstrates this classic technique
as part of his correction of the “ultralight flyover” shot ( Figure 6.7 ). (You
can follow along with these corrections by loading the tutorial scenes
from the DVD into your color correction application or plug-in.) When
creating these vignettes, some of the colorists chose to create the shape
and leave the edges sharp while affecting the secondary or setting the
shape and size of the vignette. This sharp edge made it very easy to
see exactly how much they were affecting the image. Other colorists
preferred to set the softness on the vignette's edge before affecting any
Fig. 6.7 Source image courtesy of Randy Riesen.