Has to be the Radial Filter

The radial filter wasn’t introduced into Lightroom until Adobe released their Version 5 of Lightroom.  And how I am glad they did bring us this feature.  I use it regularly… in fact I think with every photo I do somewhere in that photo is an adjustment created by the radial filter.

For instance if you want to show up some brightness around a light… you can do that easily by making your selection, inverting the mask and then increasing the exposure..

One of the things I mainly use it for is to add a Vignette to a photo.  Yes Lightroom does have an effects panel in the develop module for you to add a vignette but it works mainly from the centre of the picture… which is absolutely no good if you want to draw the viewers eye into a particular spot in a photograph.

For instance take this photo…..

Just a piece of an old tree on the ground….

But in the centre of that tree is the cotton wool larvae of an insect… which I want the reader to see.  So what I did was do my adjustments as necessary, then add a radial filter to the picture and decreased the exposure.

Which left me with this picture…

Then I cropped the picture, following the thirds rule and ended up with this final image

So if you want to add a Vignette to a picture you can easily achieve this by using the Radial Filter… you can feather the effect to your own liking and you can add more than one radial filter to a picture…

Love this tool and wouldn’t be without it now… 😀  You have all the options available to you in the panel, you can change, tint, temperature, exposure, highlights, shadows, black, whites, sharpness etc..  As well as the ability of may adding a colour to that vignette.

And not forgetting if you invert the mask you can make changes to the centre of your radial filter… It is definitely worth playing around with as there are so many options available to you.

This is same picture with the added colour..