Enhancing Fog, Moods and Atmospheres with Textures

Hello,
with September already on its way and autumn & winter approaching there will be plenty of bad weather and the chance to take some moody landscape shots. So I thought I once again do something on texturizing foggy landscapes and enhancing/creating the unique atmosphere these kind of conditions have.
Following one of my first posts that dealt with texturizing fog Adding Mood and Fog with Textures  I want to show some additional techniques to process this kind of shots.

Recently I edited a bunch of pictures where I wanted to enhance the already moody atmosphere and was looking for other ways to use textures on them. After a lot of playing around I got the best results when using at least one texture in blending mode NORMAL.
All of these texture have a few things in common:

- they have a fine structure
- they have a more or less strong cloudy appearance
- they are rather light
- they are not very colorful



Let's start with my most recent picture. Here the effect is more subtle and the fog/ mist has still a natural feel. (though the colors I chose counteract this....)

Cold Mirror

I chose a cloudy texture for this subtle effect, that added some mist in the darker parts of the picture. I used a layer mask to erase some of the texture in the lighter parts of the image. 

Settings were: 

Blending mode: Normal

Opacity: 50%

Fill: 70 % 

Storm Clouds

Adding Fog - Reducing Contrast

In the next picture it was important to get a more balanced appearance. I didn't want to  crop out the dark trunks on the left side so I had to come up with a solution to reduce the contrast. 

Empty Forest

My texture of choice was White Screen

White Screen

With a setting of 50% opacity and 70% fill and a layer mask erasing the middle I got a nice misty overlay of the dark trunks.

Another example were I used a texture which is particularly good a reducing contrasts, is my picture "Cold to the Bone"

Cold to the Bone

I used my texture Pergament from the Soft-Grunge-Textures-Bag:

Pergament

The setting was 

Blending mode: Normal

Opacity: 60%

Fill: 100 %

As mentioned before the best results you achieve with subtle & light textures. These you'll find in my

Build your own texture pack or in the Soft-Grunge-Textures-Bag



Brighten the picture using HARD LIGHT

You should also try the blending mode HARD LIGHT at a rather low opacity (< 20%) in combination with the NORMAL mode. This will add a little more texture (so use a rather fine one) and also lighten the overall picture.

That's all for today. Enjoy the fog.