How to Add and Remove Fog in Photoshop

Haze and fog work in two completely different directions depending on what your photo needs. Lightroom’s Dehaze slider can strip haze out of a photo shot on a hazy or overcast day in seconds, while Photoshop’s Difference Clouds filter can add convincing, adjustable fog to an image that has none at all. Both techniques take only a couple of minutes once you know where to look.

Getting Started: Removing Haze in Lightroom

Haze shows up any time light is scattering through fog, mist, or bright atmospheric conditions between your camera and your subject, and it flattens contrast and detail across the whole image. Lightroom’s Dehaze slider, added in the Lightroom CC 2015 release, targets exactly this problem, so make sure your copy of Lightroom is updated if you don’t see it.

1. Open the Effects Panel in the Develop Module

   Go to the Develop module and scroll to the bottom of the right-hand panel to find the Dehaze slider under Effects.

2. Drag Dehaze to the Right

   Click and drag the Dehaze slider to the right to remove haze from the image. Dragging it to the left does the opposite, adding haze — useful to know, but not the goal in this step.

Why You Pull Saturation Back Down Afterward

Dehaze tends to oversaturate colors as it removes atmospheric haze, so after finding a Dehaze value you like, pull the Saturation slider down slightly to counteract it. This one small adjustment is what keeps a dehazed photo looking natural instead of artificially punchy.

Fine-Tuning the Dehazed Image

Once the haze is gone and saturation is balanced, a small warmth adjustment often finishes the look.

3. Warm Up the Temperature if Needed

   Removing haze can leave an image looking cooler than it should. Nudge the Temperature slider warmer to compensate if the result looks too blue or cold compared to how the scene actually felt.

Setting Up a New Layer for Adding Fog

Adding fog to a photo that doesn’t have any goes the opposite direction, and it happens in Photoshop rather than Lightroom, using a render filter most people never think to reach for.

4. Create a New Layer and Fill It with 50% Gray

   Add a new layer above your background, then press Shift + Backspace on PC (Shift + Delete on Mac) to open the Fill dialog and fill the layer with 50% gray.

5. Apply the Difference Clouds Filter

   Go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds. This generates a cloud-like pattern of grays and blacks across the layer — it won’t look useful yet on its own.

Why Difference Clouds Rather Than Regular Clouds

Difference Clouds produces a more organic, uneven pattern than the standard Clouds filter, which is exactly the irregular quality that makes fog or haze look natural rather than like a flat, uniform overlay. It’s also randomized each time you apply it, so no two fog layers ever look identical.

Revealing the Fog with a Blending Mode

The raw Difference Clouds pattern includes both light and dark areas, and only the lighter, cloud-like areas should actually show up as fog.

6. Set the Layer’s Blending Mode to Screen

   Change the layer’s blending mode from Normal to Screen. Screen mode hides the black areas of the layer entirely and keeps only the lighter, cloud-textured areas visible — exactly what should read as fog. A broader look at how Blend Modes work explains why Screen behaves this way.

Shaping the Fog to Look Like Real Fog

Straight out of the filter, the pattern still looks too much like clouds and not enough like low-lying fog, so a stretch transform is what sells the illusion.

7. Stretch the Pattern Horizontally

   Press Ctrl + T on PC (Cmd + T on Mac) and use the Width field in the options bar to stretch the pattern out horizontally. Flattening and widening the cloud shapes this way makes them read as low-lying fog rather than sky clouds.

8. Scale the Fog Larger or Smaller

   Click the chain-link icon between the Width and Height fields to scale both together, adjusting the overall size of the fog pattern until the density and scale look appropriate for your specific photo.

Masking the Fog Into Place

Fog rarely needs to cover an entire image evenly — usually it should sit in the background or wrap around a specific part of the scene, which means a layer mask does most of the real placement work.

9. Add an Inverted Layer Mask

   Hold Alt on PC (Option on Mac) and click the Layer Mask icon to add a black (fully hidden) mask to the fog layer.

10. Paint Fog Back In with a Soft White Brush

    Select the Brush Tool, choose a large, soft-edged brush, set the foreground color to white, and paint over just the areas where you want fog to appear — typically the background or the areas furthest from the camera.

Adding More Fog Without Starting Over

If one layer of fog isn’t enough, duplicate the fog layer (Ctrl + J on PC (Cmd + J on Mac)), reposition the copy slightly, and mask it in the same way. Moving the copy to a new spot keeps it from simply doubling the same texture in place, and its mask decides where the extra fog shows. Group the fog layers when you’re done to compare the before and after.

Common Mistakes to Avoid With Fog and Haze

The most common mistake with Dehaze is pushing it as far as it’ll go and stopping there — without pulling saturation back down afterward, the result often looks oversaturated and unnatural. On the Photoshop side, skipping the blending-mode step and leaving the Difference Clouds layer in Normal mode is a common miss, since it hides the fog effect behind a wall of black rather than letting only the cloud shapes show through. If added fog looks too uniform or fake, stretching the pattern more aggressively before masking it in usually solves it.

Why This Technique Works

Removing and adding fog rely on opposite tools because they’re solving opposite problems, but both come down to isolating exactly the tonal information that reads as atmospheric haze and controlling it directly. Dehaze works by boosting local contrast specifically in the hazy, low-contrast parts of an image, which is why pulling saturation back afterward matters — that contrast boost affects color intensity as a side effect. On the Photoshop side, Difference Clouds paired with the Screen blending mode works because Screen is specifically built to hide dark tones and reveal light ones, turning a random cloud pattern into something that behaves exactly like a wisp of fog sitting over a scene. Once masked and shaped with a transform, that randomness is what keeps the effect from looking like a repeating, obviously fake texture.

Final Thoughts

Between Lightroom’s Dehaze slider and Photoshop’s Difference Clouds filter, most fog and haze situations are covered in a couple of minutes of work. The key habit to take away is checking your saturation after using Dehaze, and always setting your cloud layer to Screen mode before you judge whether an added-fog effect is working. Once you’re comfortable with both directions, the same underlying idea — isolating tonal range with a filter or slider, then refining color and placement afterward — carries over into other atmospheric effects, including more advanced landscape work like the kind covered in this landscape editing tutorial.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Remove hazeLightroom Develop module, Effects > Dehaze to the right; lower Saturation, warm Temperature
• Fog layerNew layer, Shift + Delete (Shift + Backspace on Windows), fill with 50% Gray
• Make the cloudsFilter > Render > Difference Clouds
• Keep the lightsBlend mode Screen
• Stretch itCmd/Ctrl + T, raise W in the options bar; chain link to scale both
• Place the fogAlt/Option-click the layer mask icon, paint white with a soft brush
• More fogCmd/Ctrl + J, move the copy, mask it

No AI, no generative credits.