One of my favorite new additions in Aperture 2.0 has to be the Vignette tool. Back in the days of darkroom printing I would always find myself burning down the corners of my prints to make them “pop” a little. You had to be careful not to over-do it, but it really made a big difference if done right.

Since then, I have always been a fan of burning my corners with Photoshop. Instead of using the Burn tool, I would normally make a new overlay layer and use a black paint brush to selectively burn certain areas. I could then set the opacity of the layer to adjust the overall effect. In some cases I would burn down quite a bit of the photo, leaving just the subject alone to make it really stand out, but normally, a little corner burning is all you really need.

Once the layer was finished, I would have to save it as a PSD, flatten the image and save it as a Jpeg before sending it on its way.

Now, with Aperture 2.0’s Vignette tool I can skip these steps in Photoshop for many of my images. Let’s take a closer look.

Here is an image I shot a few years ago at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I shot this in Jpeg with my Nikon D100 and 20mm f/2.8 lens. The color original photo leaves much to be desired as it is sort of flat and confusing.

I was thinking that perhaps a black and white conversion might bring this photo back so here is what I did.

First, I boosted the exposure a little and added some shadow detail with the Highlights and Shadows sliders.

Then, I added the Monochrome mixer tool to convert it to black and white. I played with those sliders until I thought it looked about right.

I then added a Vignette using the Gamma option for a more dramatic effect. At this point I thought it looked pretty good. I could go in and tweak things with the levels sliders if I was going to make a large print, but for now I am pretty happy.

It is pretty cool to me that I never had to leave Aperture to do all of this. A selective area dodge and burn tool would really help me in Aperture, but with this Vignette tool I can do quite a bit already.

What do you think? - Oh and by the way, notice my current Aperture 2.0 workspace layout. I am really loving this setup with the Dock hidden and the toolbar at the top hidden as well. I have so much space to work! Also, I can just keep hitting the V key to loop through my views, and the W key to loop through my inspectors. Nice!