Add Fog to Your Photos

This simple effect simulates fog--no need to wake at 5 a.m. to shoot the real thing.

Dave Johnson

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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.

Dave's Favorites: Clean Up Photos With Noiseware

Digital cameras are light hogs; they always want more! more! more! Try to take a picture in a dark place like a school gym or your living room at night, and your camera complains by speckling your photos with digital noise--random bits of color.

The standard advice for avoiding digital noise is to use a flash to illuminate your subject; to avoid shooting in dark locations; or to use noise reduction software afterwards. The main problem with the last bit of advice is that the software you need costs money--except for Noiseware Community Edition, that is.

Noiseware is a superb noise reduction filter that customizes the way it removes unwanted noise on a picture-by-picture basis, building a custom profile using a sophisticated algorithm. All that might sound pretty complex, but the reality is that noise reduction is essentially a two-click process, and the results are stunning--about the same as what you can achieve with a program like Noise Ninja, which I reviewed a few months ago. Noiseware Community Edition is free, though, which makes it a pretty compelling choice.

You can download a copy of Noiseware Community Edition from the Imagenomic site; scroll down to find the Community Edition offering. At that site you can also read about and purchase commercial versions of Noiseware, which adds features like batch processing multiple photos and TIFF file support. I highly recommend Noiseware, in whatever version you get.

Q&A: How Do I Resize Small Pictures for Large Prints?

Is there any way in Paint Shop Pro 8 or any other software to retain the sharpness and definition of my picture as I increase it in size? What seems to happen after a certain number of size increases is that the image breaks into little squares, which destroys the original.

--Selwyn Dovey, Cape Town, South Africa

That's a good question, Selwyn. A lot of us have "small" digital pictures--images that measure just 640 by 480 pixels, for instance--that we'd love to print at larger sizes. So is there any way to increase the size of a small image and print it at 8 by 10 inches?

Unfortunately, the answer is generally no. Digital images are composed of pixels. Each pixel is a dot of color that represents the smallest bit of information in a picture. When you enlarge a photo, you enlarge the individual pixels. And a picture composed of big pixels is blurry and splotchy.

I know that we see digital enlargement all the time on TV. Each week on Alias, for instance, CIA operative Jack Bristow manages to take a satellite photo and enhance it until you can clearly read the name tag stitched on the subject's shirt. In real life, though, that kind of digital trickery is just not possible.

That said, there are a few programs available that can do this sort of thing on a very limited scale. Extensis Pxl SmartScale, for instance, uses some really complex mathematics to let you print pictures at far larger sizes than would be possible based on the number of pixels in the original photo. However, the quality of your result depends upon starting with a sharp, high-quality original photo. And the program costs around $200, as the PC World Product Finder reveals.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Seahorse," by Larry Lynn, Grand View, New York

Larry took this picture of a long-snout seahorse at a depth of 60 feet on Frenchman's Reef off at Roatan Island in Honduras. He used an Olympus C-5050 inside an Olympus PT-015 underwater housing.

Larry adds: "This was a very difficult shot. The seahorse is only about four inches long. The current was brisk, and I had to hold on to something with one hand and shoot single-handed. This is not easy to do underwater with current. If you hold your breath to steady yourself, your buoyancy increases, so you rise. If you let out a breath, you sink. On top of that, about 5 other divers were jostling to get in for a shot."

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For our January winner, we chose "Winter Rose," by Ken Runyan from Willits, California.

Congratulations to Ken and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!