This is a great tool when you’re working with lenses that suffer from vignetting. Most modern lenses are pretty good in this respect and Capture One will usually have a lens profile that corrects vignetting and distortion and chromatic aberration at the same time.
But if you’re working with older vintage lenses, or cheap lo-fi lenses, Capture One won’t have a profile and some of these lenses do have pretty strong vignetting.
One of these is the otherwise excellent Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D for APS-C cameras, but the lens used for this example is a lesser-known Funleader 18mm Body Cap lens for Sony FE cameras.
In both cases the Light Falloff slider does a remarkable job of removing the corner shading, even though this varies considerably from lens to lens, both in its intensity and the distance from the center of the frame where the vignetting starts to take hold.
Lightroom Classic offers a similar Vignetting adjustment in its manual lens correction tools, but it doesn’t offer the same range of correction and sometimes doesn’t gauge the midpoint correctly.
The sample image used for this blog post looked beyond hope. The Funleader is indeed a fun lens to use, but its vignetting is so dark in the corners that it looks almost like it’s clipping to black.
And yet Capture One’s Light Falloff slider brings back the corners extremely well. In fact, with a correction value of 100 (it goes up to 120), the correction is so good that it makes this cheap lens actually look pretty good.
The single limitation is that the Light Falloff slider can only be used on RAW files. Otherwise, though, it does a remarkable job with lenses that show heavy vignetting.
