Create a Soft Focus Fog Effect in Photoshop

For this tutorial I'm using a stock photo as my example. I am going to take a nice photograph of white swans and give it a soft-focus, foggy/smokey look. This tutorial can be used with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Click on any of the following images to see larger versions.

1. Pick a good photo and open it in Photoshop. Create a new layer, and name it "Fog". This is the original we're using as an example.

2. Go to your color selector and choose a Foreground Color like light blue or pink (depending on what tint you want your fog to have) and a Background Color of medium or dark gray.

3. With the "Fog" layer selected, Click Filter> Render> Clouds. Now all you see is a big layer of clouds that are light blue and dark gray.

4. Zoom out until the picture only takes up about one quarter of the screen. Now click on the border box around the layer and look toward the the top of the screen where it says "W: 100%, H: 100%. Change the percentages to 300 each. We do this because stretching the clouds makes the fog look more realistic. Press the green check mark on top to the fog layer, and use the Crop Tool to crop the fog layer to be the same size as the rest of the picture.

5. With the top layer selected, change the blending mode from "Normal" to "Lighten" and reduce the Opacity to 70-80%. Now you should have a thick layer of fog that you can see the bottom layer through.

5. Select the eraser tool and choose a large soft round brush. Now, erase the parts of the fog that are covering important parts of objects in your photo. In this case, I erased some fog over part of the sky and the faces of the swans.

6. Now we have our fog. the next step is to create a softening filter for the overall picture. Click on the bottom layer, the main image, and duplicate that layer.

7. Select the middle layer, the one right above the bottom layer, and go to Filters> Blur> Gaussian Blur. The amount of blur you choose will depend on both the size of your image, and how soft you want the photo to be. Drag the Bar until you have a nice, fuzzy image; but don't make it so blurry that you can't make out the shapes in the photo. If you do that, you will lose the effect. Click OK.

8. Change the blending mode of the blurred layer to "Multiply". Now you have nice soft image, although it is considerably darker. If you like it the way it is, leave it. If not, select the bottom layer and go to Enhance> >Adjust Lighting> Levels. Or, since the Multiply Blending mode only darkens shadows, instead of shadows, highlights, you could opt to use Enhance> Adjust Lighting> Shadows/Highlights. Drag the levels bar around until you have the lighting you want.