>>3167120Fog is notoriously tricky to shoot. Often, you end up with one of two problems. Either (a) it's just dark and murky (like your pic), or (b) it gets overblown and overexposed because of the way the light jumps around in all the suspended water. Unless you're trying to apply some hipster, "vintage" look to it, (which I would argue against), you always have to pay close attention to your white and black points when editing foggy pictures.
So you understand what I'm talking about, check out pic related. I've opened up each of the individual RGB channel curves. Look at the left hand side of each curve. You see how the graph shoots up at the very last moment at the left edge? That's where you're losing signal for that color channel, which means it all just gets washed out in black. Basically, you're limiting your dynamic range. Instead of a gradient of colors in the shadows, you've just got black blobs.
Now, look at the right side of each curve. You see where it stops far before it reaches the right edge? That's the opposite of what you're doing at the low end. Here, there are no variations in highlights. Instead, all the channels get only so bright and then just stop, without any information beyond that point. When done in moderation, this can give images a soft, "vintage" (God I hate that word) feel. However, here, when it's such an extreme gap, it just makes the overall image dark and muddled.
There's no magic rule to this sort of thing. Generally speaking, an evenly exposed photo will have a good balance of highlights and shadows. When clip an end or fail to have the curve reach an end, then you get loss of signal and, thus, lower image quality.
This is actually a good photo to learn this concept with, since you've got both problems present simultaneously.
If you want to learn how to deal with this issue, Google terms like "white point," "black point," "levels," and "curve." There are many ways you can deal with this, to varying effects.
