Lenses and focal lengthchart

Light entering the lens converges (crosses) on its way to the image sensor. This convergence point is known as the optical centre of the lens and has the sharpest focus. The focal length is the distance between this convergence point and the image sensor.

Camera lens distance chart

If you shoot in RAW and were disappointed to hear that your in-camera lens corrections would be ignored by Photoshop, perk up. Both Lightroom and Photoshop (and a host of other editing softwares) have Lens Correction options that can manage the known eccentricities of your equipment. We discussed finding the Lens Corrections section in the Develop tab of Lightroom earlier. In Photoshop, go to Filter > Lens Correction. Your equipment info may show up in the metadata, but you can also enter it manually.

Learn more about what you can do with a standard lens in: Standard Lens Techniques: Using the Point of View to Draw the Viewer In 50mm Portraits, My Style: Creating A Picture of a Memory

If you’re using a petal-shaped lens hood and are seeing some mechanical vignetting, try turning the lens hood so that the largest petals are at the top and bottom of your lens, rather than angled diagonally so that they are visible in the corners. You may be able to place the petals out of the path of your lens rather than give up on that accessory altogether.

Lenses and focal lengthcomparison

Maggie King is a freelance writer, photo editor, and mother of three. She specializes in product photography retouching and creates regular content for several blogs and social media presences.

Vignetting is like everything else in the photographic arts: subjective. You’re unlikely to find one specific way to use it that will please everyone. But now that you understand it, you can learn to harness it in your photography. Regardless of personal preferences, other photographers will usually be able to recognize when you’ve used an effect thoughtfully and intentionally, and should respect that even if they don’t particularly care for how it turned out.

One “good” use of vignetting is to mute distracting elements at the edge of your photo. Bright colors or strong linework could lead your eye right out of the image otherwise. In the same vein, you can use vignetting to draw attention to one portion of your image. Usually this will be the center, but you can get creative with an off-center vignette for a more creative composition, as you’ll see in the image below. This type of vignette is easiest to create in post-processing.

In the field, it all really boils down to experimentation. That’s one reason it’s a good idea to rent equipment before committing to it; every lens, camera, and filter has its own quirks. If you notice that a particular lens gives you a pleasing vignette, write down the settings that worked for you. Stopping up or down, zooming, and the angle you are shooting at can all affect the amount and quality of the vignetting you get from it.

You need a very long focal length to capture a detailed close-up picture of the moon without cropping. The image above was captured at 1600mm using an 800mm lens and a 2x extender.

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Let’s look at an example. None of the three images below are technically breaking any rules, but one is definitely working better than the others. The first image is consistently bright throughout, but because of that your eye gets a little lost in all the “sameness”. The second image is bordering on kitschy. The vignette is heavy-handed and obvious. It pushes your eye quickly down the snow-covered road and there’s kind of no going back at that point. In the last photo, you’ve got a subtle, feathered darkening at the edges that gently leads your gaze down the road, allowing you to linger on everything else in the composition as you go. Bingo.

Also see: Why Is a Super Telephoto Lens Necessary for Sports Photography? What is the difference between a 200mm and 300mm telephoto lens?

You can also add a radial filter and lower the sliders on only the elements you want to affect. This method gives you a little more control once you start to feel comfortable with adding vignettes.

At 16mm, we can capture the entire façade of the fire station as well as the road and the hedge in the foreground. As the focal length increases, details appear bigger in the frame while more of the foreground and the building is cropped out. 200mm gives us a good close-up of the building name and the crests below it.

Let’s look at what happens when we shoot at different focal lengths from the same position. Note: For ease of illustration, the angles shown in this article are the horizontal angle of view.

Ultra-wide-angle lenses take in so much that they are perfect for capturing grand scenes and large objects that are right in front of you, especially in tight spaces where you cannot move further back.

Pixel vignetting is caused by the angle of the light that’s hitting your sensor, so changing your f-number isn’t going to help you much. The only way to really control this is to change your angle, but if your composition is dependent on your camera staying put, a little post-processing should manage this pretty well for you.

Vignetting from the lens itself is usually most dramatic from wide-angle lenses and wide open apertures. This can be minimized by stopping down (increasing your f-number) and choosing your lens wisely in the field. Your lens may have known issues that can be offset by settings in your camera, but be aware that these settings will probably be ignored by your editing software if you are shooting in RAW.

In post-processing, the sky really is the limit. For a straightforward, hassle-free vignette, go down to the Lens Corrections section in the Develop panel of Adobe Lightroom. There are two foolproof sliders – one for the amount of the effect you get and one to set a midpoint that determines how far into the image your vignette will reach. You can also feather a large brush and paint your vignette on to increase blacks/shadows and decrease whites/highlights at the edges of your photo.

Due to physics, a lens with a shorter focal length has a wider angle of view, and one with a longer focal length has a narrower angle of view. And that’s how we came to use focal length to describe the angle of view of a lens!

Vignetting is a useful compositional tool and an easy one to create. By understanding it and utilizing it thoughtfully, you’ll be able to subtly (or not-so-subtly) up your compositional game both in-camera and during the editing process. You can also avoid being surprised by it during a shoot! Most importantly, you now have the control to only allow quality, intentional vignetting to appear in your work.

There are actually a couple of ways to add a vignette in Photoshop. Under the Effects section in Camera Raw, you can control the amount, midpoint, roundness, feathering, and highlights in the effect with a series of sliders.

Don’t forget that you can try to reverse a vignette using the same techniques you would use to create one. Masking with a lighter solid color layer or a brightened Levels/Curves adjustment layer can make a huge difference. You can also nudge the Amount slider toward the lighter side in the vignetting section of Lightroom or Camera Raw.

Canonlenses and focal length

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That’s not to say a vignette can never be a happy accident, but it’s good to be aware of the things that trigger vignetting in your setup so that you can plan for them. In most cases, a vignette that gives you a stark silhouette of your lens hood at the corners of your photo will not do your work any favors. Unless you have a very specific reason for using that type of vignetting, it will likely be perceived as a rookie mistake. Something like that can color your audience’s feelings toward the rest of your photography.

Focal lengthcamera

A longer focal length… - Captures less of the scene (= has a narrower angle of view) - Makes distant objects appear bigger (= has a higher magnification)

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This focal length is measured when the lens is focused to infinity (far into the distance). This is because when the lens is focused to infinity, light rays enter the lens almost parallel. When focused on a nearby subject, they enter the lens at an angle.

Telephoto lenses provide an angle of view that is much narrower than human vision. 70-200mm lenses provide the classic telephoto focal range.

Notice how the buildings don’t appear to converge towards the top. They would on a wide-angle lens due to perspective exaggeration.

You can use the same masking technique with adjustment layers like Levels and Curves to affect the dynamic range of your vignetted areas in different ways. This is a good solution if you just want to tone down the highlights without punching up the blacks (or vice-versa).

A standard or “normal” lens gives a perspective that is very close to that of human vision. Most kit lenses are standard zoom lenses. The popular RF50mm f/1.8 STM “nifty fifty” lens is a standard lens on a full-frame camera, whereas the RF28mm f/2.8 STM is a slightly wider standard lens on an APS-C camera.

Ultra-wide-angle lenses exaggerate perspective so distances between objects look bigger. When combined with the wide field of view, it can bring out a sense of space.

You may already associate vignetting with photo filters you’ve used on an app or on social media, but sometimes the effect is born out of pure accident. Let’s look at a few types of vignetting you might see in your photography:

Camerafocal lengthcomparison

Focal lengthof lens formula

Mechanical vignetting isn’t terribly hard to avoid. It’s simply a matter of using only accessories that are made specifically for your camera/lens model. Of course, there is a price tag that goes along with that solution.

Lenses are classified as wide-angle, standard, or telephoto depending on their focal lengths. Ultra-wide-angle lenses are a subset of wide-angle lenses, whereas medium telephoto and super telephoto lenses are subsets of telephoto lenses.

Learn composition techniques that leverage on the characteristics of different lenses in: Professional Composition Techniques (3): Making Good Use of Lenses

The focal length also affects many other aspects of your image, such as perspective and depth of field. To find out more,  see 4 Lens Concepts to Revolutionise Your Photos.

This is not an exhaustive list of ways vignetting can occur (and a lot of people have their own names for the processes we’ve just named) but at a certain point you begin splitting hairs. The main takeaway from this section is that vignetting can be caused by improper use of accessories, intentional use of post-processing techniques, and the way cameras work in general. The most important factor is how you use it.

For harsh, tunnel-like vignettes caused by accessories, a good crop might be in order. If the effect extends so far into your image that you can’t crop it out completely without a considerable dip in quality, try cropping only some of it and reconstructing the remaining areas with a cloning or healing tool. If you know in advance that you’ll be shooting with an accessory that causes this problem, zoom out as far as you can to allow yourself plenty of cropping room in post.

Though some prefer a stronger vignette than others, most photographers can agree that a vignette that works against your composition is not a good use of that effect. If you’re not putting enough thought into your composition to be able to evaluate that, it’s time to start learning a little bit about how to compose your photographs effectively.

A shorter focal length… - Captures more of the scene (= has a wider angle of view) - Makes distant objects appear smaller (= has lower magnification)

Getting up close to birds and other wildlife requires a special type of telephoto lens: a super telephoto lens. You may want to combine it with an extender for even further reach.

How do you tell whether vignetting is enhancing your image or detracting from it? That’s largely a matter of opinion, but there are some guidelines you can remember when you evaluate the use of this effect in your work.

Focal lengthexamples

We usually describe a lens by its focal length. What does it refer to and how does it affect your images? Find out in this article.

For more control, fill a layer with solid black and add a layer mask. Use Command + I (Ctrl + I for Windows) to invert your mask, then use a feathered white brush to paint your vignette on where desired. Try different blend modes to see which one works most naturally with your image or get creative with different solid colors. This is great for off-center vignettes!

Depending on the scene and your intentions, you might not need to go ultra-wide to frame what you want to show perfectly.

When picking a lens, one of the first things you must decide on is the focal length or focal range that you want. This is because the focal length describes the angle of view, i.e., it tells how much of the scene in front of you the lens can capture.

Try experimenting with solid colors besides black when you add vignetting with an adjustment layer mask. By using the Eyedropper (I) tool to select a color that blends with your composition and finding a darker version of that color in the Color Picker, you can integrate a vignette more seamlessly into your photo.

When you look straight ahead with your bare eyes, the field of view in focus is around 50° to 60°. Wide-angle lenses are any lens that gives a field of view wider than that. Ultra-wide-angle lenses are a special kind of wide-angle lens.

The effect is called “vignetting” in the photography world, and it can happen several different ways. Use it effectively and it’s a powerful artistic tool. Botch it and you’re likely to be pegged as an amateur. The word is French in origin, dating back to the vine-like illustrations that sometimes used to run around the edge of a book page back in the 1800s. Like those illustrations, modern photographic vignetting is all about utilizing those often-forgotten edges of your image. In this guide, we’ll talk about the different causes of vignetting, why some of them are more desirable than others, and what to do about a vignette once you have one (whether you wanted it or not).

Learn more about how to make the most of wide-angle lenses in: Exploring Wide Angle Lenses Part 1: Photo Effects of Wide-Angle Lenses 24mm Closeups: 3 Simple Exercises for Mastering Wide-Angle Perspective

Any focal length above 135mm full-frame equivalent is considered telephoto. However, 70 to 135mm (full-frame equivalent) is considered short or medium telephoto. These are popular for portrait and product photography due to their natural perspective and comfortable working distance for close-up shots.

You may find after some experimentation that the best vignette is the one no one notices. A subtle effect that leads the eye without distracting from the composition will make the viewing experience a lot more organic. It’s like the difference between following step-by-step directions on your GPS and relaxing in the passenger seat. Your viewers’ eye should go where you want it to, but your viewers themselves shouldn’t have to put a lot of thought into it.

Ever noticed how some photos have that darkness creeping in around the edges, drawing your eye toward the middle of the image? You might have wondered if it was an accident or if the photographer did it on purpose, and how exactly it happened either way. The answers are as follows: maybe, possibly, and read this guide to find out.