Sandy Beaches and Creating a Vignette Effect 17/52

To create a vignette around a photo is pretty simple in Photoshop. This one might be a tad exaggerated. First, you select the Elliptical Marquee tool and draw an oval as big as you want. Next, you don't want what you selected inside the circle, so you need to "Invert" your selection which you can find in the pulldown menu. After that, right-click your oval, and select Feather...and choose about 200 pixels. This will ensure there is a gradient after you darken the corners instead of an abrupt change. Finally, you can go to Image--> Adjustments--> Levels or Curves...to darken the area outside of the oval.