| Get more bang for your buck by depositing a fog bank into your
landscape photos using the Dissolve brush mode and the Gradient
tool to vary density.
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Fog is actually transparent unless you
try to look through layers and layers of
it. Then it becomes dense, and in some
places, impenetrable. From experience,
you know the denser the fog, the more
distance you’re trying to peer through.
Begin by downloading the lake.zip 7 MB archive, extracting the lake.tif image shown at left and opening it in Photoshop. You can also use any landscape
image that lends itself to a foggy scene
and shows some distance. This technique
also works well with woodland images
and seascapes.
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The secret to realistic fog is to vary its
density; that is, make it look a little mottled.
I’ve found the best way to do this
is to alter the Brush tool. Select a brush
with a large, soft tip. Choose Dissolve
from the Mode pull-down menu in the
Options bar, and set the Opacity to 55%
to create tiny dots with each stroke. Since
fog is neither pure black nor white, click
on the Foreground Color swatch in the
toolbox and choose a medium gray from
the Color Picker. Add a layer above the
photo, and paint horizontal strokes for a
speckled effect. In my image, I painted
just above the water and kept the sky
and foreground clear. Apply just enough
of a Gaussian Blur to make the little puffs
coalesce into a cloudlike texture—too
much blur will even out the effect.
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To give the illusion of fog building
up in the distance, you could painstakingly
use a brush to paint on a mask with
varying opacities, but there’s an easier,
more efficient way. With the paint layer
selected, click the Add a mask icon at the
bottom of the Layers palette. Select the
Gradient tool (G), and choose a Linear
Black, White gradient. With the mask thumbnail active, drag from the top of
the photo and stop partially into the
painted fog. Now hide any fog in the
lower region of the image. (Depending
on your image, you may not need to do
this if you want the fog to increase in
density into the farthest reaches of your
image.) With the mask thumbnail still
active, drag a gradient from the bottom
of the photo into the painted fog. This
makes the fog more transparent in the
foreground, giving you a nice buildup
as the distance increases.
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To mask the fog from any foreground
items that should be clear (like the frond
on the left), zoom in, and paint on the
mask with a hard, black brush set to
Normal brush Mode.
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For Photoshop 7 and later, you can
add realistic clouds to a sky by slightly
altering the second step. After choosing your
brush, click on the Color Dynamics
title in the Brushes palette, and set
the Foreground/Background Jitter to
15%. Set the Foreground Color to an
off-white instead of gray since clouds
are lighter than fog. Additionally, set
the Background Color by sampling the
sky with the Eyedropper tool. Then
continue with the second and subsequent steps.
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Dave Diotalevi is a freelance writer,
digital artist, designer, and retoucher.
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