Fishing in the fog

Here's an example of an early morning foggy bird photo photoshopped with every adjustment I could find to bring out the imge. Does anyone have designs on a fog filter?

Janet B

Noise Ninja would remove some of the noise thru the whole image I see... it looks a bit overworked at this point but NN would help smooth it out.

I'd like to see what it looks like without the attempts at bringing out the image too much and the fog left in place. The image does looked overworked with quite a bit of noise.

Janet,
I feel your pain. I have a rare shot that I think could make me quite alot of money. The only problem is that it has alot of noise. When I apply noise noise reduction, It doesn't have near the same impact because of the loss of detail.

The sharpness of the water under the bird looks a little unnatural in contrast with the fog elsewhere. Other than that IMHO you've got a wonderful capture!

Here's the pelican in all his glory with no attempts to draw out any detail. It was the highlights/shadows tool that took the grain over the top. I'm not trying to do any great fixin' because this image just isn't going to go anywhere but into my trash can in the upper right corner of my desktop. The water may appear sharper because the reflections is closer to me. Fog diminishes the sharpness as the distance becomes greater - the bird.

I have to say that in spite of the image being ugly, the sight was magnificant - which is why I was there!

Janet B

That is a very difficult shot to fix. The fog placed everything in the same color range. Too bad because that is a cool shot....

Janet - Another idea would be to play around with some artistic filters on your image. I took a few minutes to give it a shot with your original jpeg. Here is what I came up with. Add a levels layer, adjusting the highlights and shadows here. Then a small curves adjustment layer and a contrast layer with a boost +6. This left the image with a slight blue hue, which I adjusted in selective color layer reducing -49 cyan on the cyans and -47 cyan on the blues.
Save here before adding artistic filters, so you can play with the different filters to see what you like the best. Artistic filters can only be added to the background layer after you have converted to 8 bits/channel. I added a Find Edges filter found under filters-stylize, fade effect to 3%; then I added a watercolor effect also faded to 3%. I also did a slight CW correction of 1% and cropped slightly. Just some ideas to play around with, you might be able to come up with some fun stationery or greeting card.

Interesting Elizabeth. I have always often fooled around with the watercolor effect, but always came out with such drastic effects. the idea of layering and reducing the percent is good. I agree this is the kind of photo that could be fun to "mess with" in filters.

I have often admired your application of the artistic effects on the flowers that you have posted here. Thanks for the ideas.