CGCookie – Working with Vignettes in the VSE

In the same way that you can sculpt clay or wood, vignettes let you shape light and shadows. They can add depth, atmosphere, mystery, or wonder to your digital images. A vignette mimics subtle effects of human vision reproducing fall- offs in color perception and brightness around the periphery of our field of view. Technically a vignette is the actual fall-off in brightness across an image towards the edge. The darker less saturated borders drive the viewers attention back toward the focal point.

Blender has many tools that can be enlisted in building vignette effects. In this tutorial series, we will:

1. Find out how to construct vignettes in the VSE using the UV/Image editor’s mask tool.
2. Learn to duplicate, animate and move the vignette around the timeline.
3. Discover how to build vignettes in the compositor.