Benefits
of the plug-in

Edit radial exposure
Edit radial brightness
Even exposure throughout the photo from center to corner
Create radially transparent masks for radial color-correction

The radial density filter plug-in works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8,16 bit / channel: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, Lab.

Radial Density
filter controls

This is the Radial Density plug-ins control panel (Windows). Click the image to enlarge. The control panel and preview area can be changed by dragging the edges.

The filter has only three basic sets of controls:

1. radius of the density filtering.
2. radial exposure filters.
3. radial brightness filters.

Example -

The Radial Density plug-in is the only one of its kind for correction of uneven radial exposure and brightness.

What is "Density"?

"Density" refers to the combined effect of exposure and brightness -- and to some extent saturation.

"Radial density" refers to the changes in these from the center to the corner of an image.

What is "Vignetting"?

"Vignetting" refers to radial change in exposure by the lens of the camera.

Lenses - especially wide-angle lenses and home digital cameras - do not expose evenly, but tend to expose the corners less than the center. If you were to photograph a monochrome white surface under uniform light, you would get an image of the vignetting of the lens that looked somewhat like this...

The plug-ins filtering controls

Vignetting

Radial Density

Radius

Hot spot
spread

Contrast

Diffusion

This slider is not something you should be too concerned about. Just leave it at 50.

Diffusion blends the individual compensation steps into each other and produce a more smooth effect.

Without any diffusion the individual steps of the radial compensation gradient might be very clear and appear as rings. Too much diffusion on the other hand may appear grainy.

Edges

Here you can raise or lower the exposure and brightness at the edges.

Normally you will be most interested in raising the exposure of the edges.

Center

Here you can raise or lower the exposure and brightness at the center.

Make transparent

Retouch levels

As with most Power Retouche plug-ins you can control the amount of retouching in the lights, mid tones and darks.

White Alert and Black Alert will apply their respective colors to areas in the preview that are pure white or pure black. You can change the color of the mask by clicking in the colored rectangle.

Examples of Radial Exposure

Vignetting

To get a perfect result, we had to focus the filtering to mid tones by setting Lights to 0 and Darks to 50.

Radial exposure correction

This is a different case where the central face has become underexposed because of the hard light to the left. In order to correct this we used radial exposure to raise the face and darken the edges.

Creating frames and working with transparency

With the Radial Density plug-ins controls you can also create frames. If you use the transparency option, you can create toned frames.

In the first instance we simply reduced radial brightness. Since the background is white, this creates a gray frame.

In the second instance we wanted a warm frame, so we copied the picture of the baby and pasted it onto a monochrome warm background. We then used the plug-in on the baby-layer to create radial transparency.

You could also create a create a toned frame by making the center transparent and pasting the result onto the original image and then editing the top layer with the transparent center with other plug-ins. In the following example we edited the transparent top layer with Power Retouche Color Editor.