I was recently in Edinburgh, Scotland for a week, and while I was there I had been planning to spend quite a bit of time out taking photos around the city. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. It was pretty much raining and cold the whole time. And when I say cold, I do mean cold. But more than that, it was really dark. Like, twilight dark the entire time. So eventually, I forced myself to get out and shoot, regardless of the result, and said result wasn’t great. However, when I got back to my computer, with a little editing I was able to get a pretty decent image of the castle. As there was such a difference between the result I got and where I started from, It thought It would make a good tutorial video, and so here you go!

The funny thing about this video is that it literally took me a week to make. I had originally planned to post this on Wednesday, but couldn’t get it ready in time. It’s possibly the most ridiculously convoluted session I’ve had ever making a video. It’s not that there is anything overly complicated in it, but for some reason, nothing would go right when I was making it. I started off as I always do, with a practice run, making notes of the important things to talk about. That was fine, but then when I went to record it, it was a disaster, and I kept forgetting what to say, and it was just an overall mess. So much so, that I just said, to hell with this and deleted it.

Attempt two went perfectly. Or so I thought. Somehow my microphone settings got changed, and the gain was far too high, so everything was garbled. At this point, I was beginning to think the whole project was cursed. Finally, the third time, I managed to get through it all without something going terribly wrong, although I did have to reshoot the intro, as I had been reading off a script and it looked ridiculous.

The original unedited image. This was how dark it was in the afternoon.

The final version (from a previous attempt at the video - this one was slightly better)

For the edit itself, I started off in Lightroom, and did the basic edits there. Then I moved over to Photoshop and did the rest of the editing there. I also used Luminar Neo as a plug-in to use the cool “Light Depth” feature. I also did a very subtle grade in DXO Film Pack to use my favourite film: Kodak Elite Chrome. I also added some snow to beef up the wintery feel to the image. This was something that came about between takes two and three! I used a snow image from iStock photo for the snow, although technically, it is a water droplet image.

Earlier version without the snow. I go back and forward as to whether I prefer this version or not.

The action I used in Photoshop to create a vignette is pretty simple. You draw a marquee, and then run the action. All it does is create a curves adjustment layer with the middle point dragged down to reduce the brightness, and then blurs the mask. You can download it using the button below.

Download Action

While this is a pretty long tutorial, I did my best to explain as much as possible as I went along, so I think there’s lots you can learn from this. Or at least, I hope you learn something from it. Please let me know if you ant to see more videos like this.

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