Adding convincing artificial fog can give your landscape photographs depth and mood that's tough to create in camera. If you've struggled to do it effectively in Lightroom, this technique can take your results to a new level.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this practical video walks you through the process of adding realistic-looking fog to your images using nothing more than Lightroom's built-in masking tools. Möhrle emphasizes the importance of breaking your landscape into layers, treating each individually with radial gradients. By working on different parts separately, he demonstrates how you can create believable depth, mimicking fog as it naturally settles into valleys and behind hills. The key techniques involve gently raising the blacks slider to create a fog-like glow and reducing dehaze to amplify the soft, misty effect. He stresses that subtlety is crucial; overdoing it could result in an image that looks unrealistic or awkwardly edited.
The very useful part of Möhrle's tutorial is how he addresses common mistakes and challenges you'll likely encounter with this technique. One such problem is unnatural fog overlap on nearby elements. He carefully demonstrates how to use Lightroom's object selection and subtraction features to remove fog from unintended areas, creating precise, believable effects. You'll also appreciate his tips for fine-tuning the color temperature and saturation of the fog so it matches your image seamlessly and convincingly.
Beyond the fog effect itself, the video also includes practical advice about basic adjustments that complement this technique. Möhrle shows how to set the exposure, highlights, and shadows before adding fog, ensuring you have a strong foundation to build from. His approach to denoising is a lesson in itself, especially when working with high-ISO images. Additionally, he offers helpful guidance on selective adjustments beyond fog, such as enhancing foreground elements to improve composition and visual flow. His quick and actionable suggestions on color grading and split toning round out the tutorial nicely, demonstrating how colors impact the mood you're trying to establish.
Rather than relying on additional plugins or Photoshop, Möhrle achieves everything you need using only Lightroom. Learning to break down a scene and visualize its editing potential is just as valuable as the technique itself. You may well find these methods applicable to other kinds of selective edits beyond fog, giving you extra incentive to experiment and refine your Lightroom skills. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”
