HSL Vignette Macro - Flexible and Non-Destructive

[Ldina]

There are lots of approaches to creating vignettes, and many good very ones on this forum. I have attached an HSL Vignette Macro for Affinity Photo v2 that I find extremely versatile and it is totally non-destructive. I'll provide some examples, but first I will explain how it is constructed. This is a variation of a technique I saw on YouTube by DavroDigital. 

Below is a screenshot of the HSL Vignette Group, which is created by the attached Macro and added to the top of the layer stack.The HSL Vignette Group Layer controls the brightness or darkness of the vignette by adjusting the HSL Luminance Slider, so you can brighten or darken the vignette as desired. You can also control the Hue and Saturation if you wish to alter them, which can come in handy. The Macro is set to Overlay Blend Mode by default, but you can quickly change it to Normal, Multiply, Soft Light, Screen, or any other Blend mode, which provides a lot of flexibility and different looks. 

I usually use an Ellipse or a Rounded Rectangle for the shape of the vignette, and both are loaded by the macro, with the Ellipse current set to be visible, and the rounded rectangle hidden. This makes it easy to switch between the two, depending on your image and desired vignette shape. Just hide one and make the other visible. (You can also add other shapes from the Shapes Toolbox as desired, but be sure to set the Blend Mode of the added shape to Erase.) The actual shapes are set to "Erase Blend Mode" so whatever is inside of the shape does not affect the underlying image. (Note: The PDF standard does not support Erase Blend Mode.)

Shapes are vectors and can be modified, moved, enlarged, reduced in size, rotated, etc, at any time. This provides precise control of placement and the areas affected. You can also Convert a shape to Curves if you want to distort or modify the shape to suit your own specific image needs.

The Gaussian Blue Layer controls the hardness or softness of the vignette, from hard to super soft. 

All of these controls are live and non-destructive, so you can modify any of them at any time.

 

Below are a few examples applied to a very plain image. (As usual, I forgot to convert the screenshots from my Display P3 profile to sRGB, so I apologize for the muted, washed-out colors on this forum, which strips the profile and assumes it is sRGB. But, they still illustrate how to use the macro and its flexibility.) Some of these effects are purposely overdone and not optimized, so the effects are visible in the screenshots. I'm sure you will use them with more finesse. 

This first image is the original, without any vignette (the HSL Vignette Group has been hidden). Pretty plain vanilla.

 

Below, the HSL Vignette Group has been made visible. This is the macro default, which is set to Overlay Blend Mode, uses the Ellipse shape, hides the rounded rectangle shape, adds a 350 pixels gaussian blur, and sets the HSL Luminance slider to -30%. Currently the ellipse is centered in the image. All layers are live and fully adjustable by clicking on their respective thumbnails. 

 

Below, I opened the HSL Layer and moved the Luminance Slider to +60%, which lightened the vignette area outside of the ellipse. This is still set to Overlay and has the same blur radius as the previous screenshot. 

 

Below, I set the HSL Blend Mode to Normal, then used the HSL layer's Saturation slider to desaturate the vignette area somewhat. Over exaggerated to demonstrate the effect online.

 

In the screenshot below, I set the HSL Vignette Layer to Multiply Blend Mode for a darker result. Different blend modes provide a lot of flexibility in how the vignette is rendered. You also have the ability to adjust the Group Opacity to reduce the effect. 

 

There is an almost unlimited variety of effects depending on your choices. I hope you find the above technique useful and flexible. A single click on the Macro (in the Library Panel, Window > Library) launches the macro, loads all layers at the top of the stack and Groups them.

To load the macro, download the attached Macro, Open the Library Panel in Photo, click on the 'hamburger menu" and select Import Macro, which will add it to your library. 

EDIT: I edited and updated the attached macro for two reasons. First, to center the Ellipse and Rounded Rectangle on the Canvas, regardless of pixel dimensions of the original image. You will probably need to select the Move Tool and rescale and reposition the ellipse or rectangle to suit.

The 2nd reason is due to a bug in Affinity's Macro recording process that rasterizes an "Image Layer" if it is the ONLY layer in the stack. Since I wanted a non-destructive process, I updated the macro to work around this bug. It should work properly on ALL images now.

Lou Dina

 

 

 

HSL Vignette (ND).afmacro