How to Add Real Depth in Lightroom Without Overediting

Fog can turn a strong landscape into a flat sheet, even when the scene looked deep in person. The fix is rarely a single slider, and the right masking move in Lightroom can make fog read like real space instead of gray mush.

Coming to you from Christian Möhrle, this practical video walks through a full Lightroom edit where the goal is depth in a foggy foreground, not a punchy, crunchy look. You start with a very dark raw file, which forces you to think about noise before you start yanking exposure around. Möhrle runs Lightroom’s Denoise early, then moves fast through the basic panel to pull detail back out of the shadows without blowing the sky. He raises exposure, then reins in highlights, then lifts shadows and blacks in a way that softens contrast instead of chasing a harsh “HDR” feel. Only after the tonal structure is in place does he nudge white balance cooler and clean up a faint magenta cast, then adds a bit of vibrance and texture while pulling clarity and dehaze down for a controlled glow.

The middle of the edit is where the video gets useful if you keep ending up with fog that looks pasted on. Instead of masking everything with one big sky or foreground selection and calling it done, Möhrle builds separation in layers. He hits the foreground fog with a linear gradient, brightens it with highlights and whites, then adds clarity just enough to reveal structure that’s already there. In the sky, he uses a color range mask to target the blue, darkens it for contrast, then subtracts with a gradient so the change doesn’t creep into areas that should stay light. He also creates a separate sky selection to lift the lower part of the sky for a brighter band near the horizon, then warms that area so the cold fog still has a counterpoint. When he adds glow, it’s not a single radial filter tossed over the sun; he stacks multiple radial gradients, pushes blacks, and even allows clipping on purpose in one of them, which is a choice you’ll either copy carefully or avoid entirely.

Then comes the brush mask section. Möhrle breaks down brush size and feather quickly, then spends real time on flow versus density, with simple examples that show why they behave differently when you paint twice over the same area. Low flow lets adjustments build with each pass, while lower density caps the effect no matter how many strokes you add, which matters when you’re trying to sculpt fog without leaving obvious brush marks. He sets the brush up with a very soft edge, keeps density high, drops flow to a low value, and paints selective highlights into the fog, then reinforces a few spots with extra passes so the foreground gains shape without turning gritty. After that, he moves into color work: targeted saturation and hue changes in the mixer, warm-versus-cool balance in color grading, and extra calibration tweaks that he treats differently because the file is from a drone, with a few adjustments he leaves to taste rather than rules. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”