How to Darkening Photo Edges In Photoshop

Here's an effect that I use quite often with my own photos to bring more attention to the main subject of an image or just to give photos a little more warmth and personality. Once you see how easy it is to create, I think you'll find yourself using it as much as I do. We're going to learn how to darken or burn the edges of a photo, creating a vignette effect, and we're actually going to create the effect using a filter in Photoshop that was designed to remove such a "problem" from an image. In Photoshop CS2 (you'll need Photoshop CS2 or later to complete this tutorial), Adobe introduced us to the Lens Correction filter. This filter's main purpose is to help us remove common problems that can be created by camera lenses, such as barrel distortions, chromatic aberration and vignetting. It's a great addition to Photoshop's ever growing collection of photo editing tools, but there's no rule that says you have to use Photoshop the way the folks at Adobe intended. As we'll see, the same filter designed to remove dark edges from a photo also happens to be a great way to add them!