How to add a smoke or mist effect to my product photos using AI?

The hard part about adding smoke or mist to a product photo isn't the smoke itself. It's making the smoke look like it belongs there.

When you overlay a texture in Photoshop, you get something that looks like a texture overlaid on a photo. The lighting doesn't match. The shadows don't make sense. The depth is wrong. Your eye knows something's off, even if you can't say exactly what.

The problem is that smoke and mist aren't just visual effects—they're physical phenomena. They interact with light. They cast shadows. They have depth. To make them look real, you need to understand how they would actually behave in that scene. Most people don't have that skill, and even if you do, it takes forever.

There's a better way. Tools like Nightjar are built specifically for product photography. They understand how atmospheric effects work with product lighting because that's what they're trained on. You just describe what you want: "add mist behind the product" or "create fog around this." The system figures out the physics.

The real win is consistency. Once you find a smoke or mist effect you like, you can save it as a style and reuse it across your entire catalog. Upload a reference image, create the style, and every new product photo will have the same atmospheric treatment. This is what separates professional product photography from amateur work—not just doing it once, but doing it the same way every time.

If you're starting from scratch, you can also use Nightjar to generate the whole photo with the effect built in. This often works better than adding it later, because the lighting, shadows, and atmosphere are all created together as one scene. The product stays exactly as it is—same colors, same materials, same details. Only the atmosphere changes.