Photographing foggy/misty scenes requires much skill from the photographer. Fog usual occurs in the evening and lasts until early morning. Very often over water as the water is warmer than the surrounding air.

Fog and mist naturally knock out colour, rendering the scene quite ‘flat’ and lacking in contrast, so longer exposure times are required to achieve a good photograph. When there is light involved, generally at night, the fog/mist create refraction which can fool the camera’s light monitor – these are a couple of the obstacles the photographer faces when shooting foggy/misty scenes, and where great skill is required.

This round-up brings you more than 40 outstanding and beautiful photographs shot in foggy/misty weather.

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Here is a Photoshop action that will give a photo a watercolour painting effect.

When using this action, if the effect is too much and is knocking out all the details, reduce the opacity of Layer 1 and/or Layer 1 copy 2

I hope you like this action, can use it and enjoy it!

Click on the image to download the .atn file

The title seems to be a contradiction in terms: how can natural cloud formations be unrealistic? But it does happen, and often!

Many times I look at the sky and consider that if an artist faithfully represented the cloud formation it would be considered unrealistic as a painting - which throws a shadow over the concept that artists are only limited by their own imagination - that is, if they want their art to appear realistic!

The best times to catch unrealistic cloud formations are sunrise and sunset and before, during or after a storm, however, strange formations can occur at any time of the day, any time of the year.

Here is a selection of beautiful but unrealistic natural cloud formations produced by outstanding photographers.

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Here is a set of 20 gradients for Photoshop. I have called them 'New Year' simply because they were created at the beginning of the year. There is no real theme to them, just a collection of gradients that will hopefully be useful.

Although many designers don't like to use pre-made gradients, they can be a good starting point for creating your own, therefore saving a lot of time - always a bonus for busy designers!

Click on the image to download the .grd file.

Snow is a very unforgiving type of weather – it is cold, icy and generally dangerous to be out in.  However, there is no doubt it is beautiful – nature plays tricks with us with snow!

For those of us who see snow most years, it is difficult to imagine there are people in this world who have never seen it – I expect that is the same vice versa too!

Here I have collected a selection of 30 snowy scene photographs that are of picture postcard quality. The beauty of the scenes draw us in… but beware, snowy weather will chew you up and spit you out!!

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Today I am bringing you a .psd colouring file that will turn a daytime photograph to a red sunset.

The beauty of .psd files is that all the adjustment layers are available for making your own desired changes, and although for most images not a lot of tweaking should be necessary, the facility is invaluable to get the exact effect you require.

I hope you have a use for this and enjoy it!

Click on the image below to download the .zip file

It must be wonderful to be an artist and be able to create stunning pieces of work from scratch, and these days there is such a lot of outstanding digital art around, there is a huge amount of talent out there!

Here we bring you a collection of some beautiful digital scenic paintings. Some are scenes that are quite real – or could be, others are fantasy scenes, and some are somewhere between the two, with elements of reality and elements of fantasy – they are all examples of stunning digital art.

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As the season is approaching very rapidly, I have created a bright, colourful texture for free download.

The size is 3000 x 2000px, 72ppi resolution.

This texture gives some wonderful results overlaid on snowy scene backgrounds with a layer blending mode applied. The image below shows the results of 4 such blends.

I hope you have a use for this texture.... Enjoy!

Click on the image to download the .zip file.

Today I have created a psd colouring file that gives a dark, grainy effect for portrait photographs.

There is a texture included with this file. If the texture is too small for your image, simply use the Transform tool to resize it to cover the canvas.

I hope you have a use for this and enjoy it!

Click on the image to download the file.

There are many, many brushes available for Photoshop, and combining brushes with Photoshop’s layer modes can create some stunning colouring effects.

For this quick tip in colouring in Photoshop you will need brushes that have shading – solid shapes will not work with this method.

Using just a few colours and different layer modes you can create art with subtle shade differences, and the variances are almost endless – this is a great way to learn how the layer modes work, you can adjust, readjust and adjust again until you achieve the desired effects.

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