Photoshop Fog Effect Tutorial

Posted on June 1, 2008 by Thomas

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This blog post officially kicks off the Photoshop Tutorial Review mini-series, and it only seemed natural to start off with PhotoshopTutorials.ws. Entering PST, I was very happy. The site is clean, no clutter, and not over-done. The purpose of this post is not to actually be a tutorial, its for me to do the actual tutorial, and then provide anything that I believe could be improved upon, allowing you to get the best of the best. At PST, there are many different types of tutorials. There are tutorials strictly about Photoshop, but there is also photography, downloads, and forums to seek further help. One thing that separates this tutorial site from the rest is that it actually pays members who write great tutorials cash via Paypal. As I browsed the tutorials, I noticed they were very novice-friendly and detailed. After finding one that I really liked, I will walk through it beginning to end.

The first tutorial is titled: How to Create a Fog Effect on Any Nature Image. I had to find a landscape or forest walkway for this picture, so i browsed Google, and ended up choosing this. I dragged it into Photoshop, and started working through the tutorial. In the beginning you have to mess with the layer pallet, so if it’s not already open, go to window>layer. The new adjustment editor is the white and black circle on the bottom of the palette. These were the only things I discovered that might trouble new users:

On Step 8: the foreground is the part closest to the camera, for those of you who don’t know. After that point most of it was self-explanatory.

Using their tutorial, I ended up with this. As you can see, the effect in the tutorial result is a bit overdone, and extremely fake looking. After a bit of adjustment, such as lowering the opacity, erasing with a texturized brush, and messing with the layer order, and ended up with a more realistic-looking image. All in all this tutorial is amazing to learn about new layers and how to add layer masks. But in reality it’s a mediocre result, leaving you with a completely fake-looking image, which defeats the purpose.