[Leica] IMG: More Fog & Light, two crops

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2008-12-01-03:15:46 Mark Rabiner:
> If it was digital I'd go into mask mode in Photoshop and using the 
> gradation
> tool select the top of the picture in a gradated fashion then go back into
> regular mode and darken the gradated top with either the curve tool command
> M or command L Levels.
> So the shot does not fall off the top.
> This is standard advice.
> I do it to most my images.
> As do lots of people.

A thing I've found lots of images benefit from is:

  if you have unnecessarily bright corners, and the main subject is
  reasonably far into the frame:

    in Lightroom, in the Vignettes section, in the Post-Crop subsection,
    start dragging Amount to the left until you start to clearly see the
    effect.  Then back off until it stops being obvious, or even really
    visible unless you had the original to compare it with.

    Voila!  Some magical Noctilux-style vignetting to focus the eye back
    toward the middle!

And Leica have devoted so much R&D energy to creating lenses which
vignette as little as possible, and even to writing some electronic
vignette correction into camera firmware.  Almost makes me feel
ungrateful.

 -Jeff