Image Vignette Generator
Image
A vignette is a gradual fall-off in brightness from the center of an image toward its edges. Optical vignetting happens naturally in long telephoto lenses and wide apertures; photographers add artificial vignettes in post to subtly direct the viewer's eye toward the subject, mimic a film aesthetic, or push a portrait toward an intimate studio mood. This tool builds the vignette as a smooth radial gradient (using a smoothstep curve between an inner clear radius and an outer fully-affected radius) and composites it onto your image pixel-by-pixel. You can pick the shape (true circle, image-aspect oval, or rectangular falloff that hugs the frame edges), choose darken or lighten mode, set any color (black for classic, white for a high-key bloom, warm tan for vintage), and dial in three independent knobs: amount (how strong the effect gets at the edges), softness (how gradual the transition is), and radius (how big the untouched center is). Everything runs entirely client-side — your image never leaves the browser tab.
How to use
- Upload or drag-drop an image (PNG / JPG / WebP, up to 1400 px on the long side).
- Pick a preset (Classic darken, Portrait, Spotlight, White high-key, Soft pink, Vintage) or build your own.
- Drag amount, softness, and radius to taste — watch the canvas update live.
- Pick a shape: oval (default, follows aspect ratio), circle (radial regardless of aspect), or rect (rectangular falloff hugging the frame).
- Switch darken / lighten mode, change color, then download the result as a PNG.
Frequently asked questions
- What's the difference between the three shapes?
- Oval scales distance by image width and height separately, so the vignette ellipse always matches the image's aspect ratio — this is what most photo editors do by default. Circle uses the longer of width / height for both axes, so the vignette is a true circle and the corners go darker on wide or tall images. Rect uses the maximum of the horizontal and vertical normalized distance (a Chebyshev metric), producing a rectangular falloff that hugs the frame edges instead of an ellipse — good for cinematic letterbox-style edge darkening.
- How is the gradient curve computed?
- We use the smoothstep function — t = clamp((d − r_inner) / (r_outer − r_inner), 0, 1), then t = t² · (3 − 2t). This gives an S-curve transition between the clear inner region and the fully-affected outer region, which avoids the harsh band you get with a linear ramp and the muddy look you get with a pure squared falloff. Amount scales the maximum strength, softness widens the transition zone, radius shifts where the transition starts.
- Is my image uploaded?
- No. The image is read into the browser's canvas and processed locally by JavaScript on your device. Nothing is sent to a server. Drop a private photo here without worry — it lives only in your tab until you close it.
- Can I undo a vignette that's already baked into a JPEG?
- Not perfectly, but you can approximate it by running this tool in lighten mode with the same shape and radius as the original — it brightens the corners back up. Because JPEG compression and the original gradient curve are both unknown, expect some residual color shift. For an exact reverse you'd need to know the photographer's original radius / amount.
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