Feature: Add Fog to Your Photos
I love the look of fog rolling into a landscape, but I am doubly cursed: For years I lived in places that had no fog; and now that I live in a foggy area, I find that I sleep through the foggiest hours of the day.
Although you can't beat the look of real fog, this week I have a simple effect that you lets you put fog in your photos requiring you to get up at 5 a.m. to shoot the real thing.
Desaturate Your Photo
When you're looking at a foggy landscape, the suspended water molecules in the air filter out the scene's true colors. Any picture you take will have a bleached, almost black-and-white quality.
So the first thing you should do to any photo that you plan to fog up is pull some of the color out. Open a picture in an image editing program like Jasc Paint Shop Pro. If you like, you can use my picture of water lilies in the Tetons.
Choose Adjust, Hue and Saturation, Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Pull the Saturation slider down to about -70 to remove most of the color from the picture, then click OK.
Add a Mask
Now we're going to put some fog into the photo by adding a mask layer on top. The mask will let us create a graduated change in brightness from the bottom to the top of the image. To do this, choose Layers, New Mask Layer, Show All; click OK if you see a dialog box asking if it's okay to promote the picture to a full layer.
Add a Gradient
To create the gradual brightness change, we need to apply a grayscale color gradient to the mask. That's a fancy way of saying we'll paint the mask so its brightness changes gradually from bottom to top. To do that, we'll need to open the Materials palette, which usually lives on the screen. If you don't see it, choose View, Palettes, Materials. (Also check to see that it's not minimized--there are all sorts of palettes that can live on the screen, including the Layers palette. Look for the Materials title bar and maximize it.)
Within the Materials palette lives the Color palette. Next to the Color palette, there are two color squares: The top is the foreground color and the bottom is the background color. Under the foreground color, there are three small buttons. The first one, which is probably already set to a color and looks like a dot, controls the kind of fill style. Click on the color dot and select Gradient from the drop-down menu. Your screen should now look something like this.
We've turned on the Gradient mode for the mask, and now we need to set the gradient to a continuous black-to-white fill. To do that, click in the foreground color square. The Material dialog box should appear, set to the Gradient tab. Click the big button that's just above the Edit button and select "Black-white," which you'll find at the top right of the very extensive list of gradients. Click OK to apply your changes.
We're ready to paint the gradient onto the picture. For this scene, I imagine that only about the bottom third of the scene is foggy; the top two-thirds should be clear.
Click the Selection tool (it lives in the fifth cubby from the top of the toolbar on the left side of the screen) and make sure the Selection Type is set to Rectangle in the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen. (If you don't see the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen, toggle it on by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options.) Also set the Feather to 0 and make sure the Mode is set to Replace. After making those changes, drag a selection box through the bottom one-third of the scene.
Now click the Flood Fill tool (it's in the fifth cubby from the bottom of the toolbar) and click it in the selected box. That's it! Save the picture and close it. Then reopen it and you'll see faux fog at the bottom of the scene.
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