Creating fog

Author: Corinne

Tools Needed

• Photoshop

In this tutorial I will teach the Photoshop beginners an easy way to create fog.

The tutorial has been written by using Photoshop 7, some differences may appear with the tools used if you use a previous version.

An advice : work on a large file. My example has been done on a 1000×1000 pixels wide file, and has been cropped to 500×500. If you already have a rendered scene in your mind, make the dimensions fit to it.

Open your render and create a new layer over it. Fill it with white.

We're going to create fake clouds using a Photoshop filter.

Got to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds.

You should have something looking like this :

You can give this texture more contrast. Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/contrast and drop up the contrast setting.

Now lower the opacity of the fog layer to 60% (this value can depend on the effect you want).

Pick your Erase tool with a large smooth round brush (I took a 300 px) and carefully erase a bit of the texture, in various places, especially on the top, depending on how your scene is built.

It looks a bit gray. This could be useful for smog scenes, but for this one I wanted a natural fog.

To adjust the color of your fo layer, go to Layer > New adjustment layer > Hue saturation.

Make sure the option “Associating to layer” is checked.

I did a nice frosty fog on this image using the following settings (make sure the Redefine option is checked) :

You can play with these settings how much you want / need.

Here's how it looks :