Using the Dehaze feature in Lightroom

- If you do a lot of landscape photography, haze is often going to be something that you battle. Haze, of course, is just stuff in the air, but when the air gets that stuff in it, it means that distant objects are going to lose a lot of contrast. Looking through all of that haze in the air, really brings down your black levels on things that are far away. If you saw my Travel Photography: Desert Landscapes course, you saw me battling haze at one point. I was standing, trying to get a shot of a distant mountain range, but the air was so hazy that it just looked flat and blah.

I fixed it there with a levels adjustment by simply changing the contrast in the scene to bring out more detail, and that works well, but if you're using a more recent version of Lightroom or Photoshop Camera Raw, you have a new tool here, and it's really cool. I am here in Lightroom. I'm going to go into my Develop Module on this image. I was recently in the Badlands in South Dakota, and because Montana and Oregon and Washington were all burning down, the sky was full of just a tremendous amount of haze.

It was really an obstacle to even visualizing a shot, but I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a great "way to play with the Dehaze tool." 'Cause, you know, that's my idea of what to do on a vacation. Anyway, I'm here in the Develop Module, and over here, if I scroll down to the very, very bottom there is a single slider now called "Dehaze." This is my original shot. I haven't done anything to it, and if you look at my Histogram you can see that I'm facing a textbook low contrast problem. I have no black to speak of. I don't really even dark tones.

I don't get any tonality at all until almost middle gray. I've got all these tones bumbled up here, and then I've got this spike out here which is, of course, the sky. So as far this part of the landscape, that's all represented by this tiny bit of data here that's all clustered together. So this is really a low contrast image. I could go in and fix this, or try to fix it, using all of the normal low contrast tools, or I can simply grab this Dehaze tool and slide it to the right, meaning I am increasing the amount of "dehaziness," decreasing the amount of haze.

Watch what happens as I slide to the right. My image just becomes less hazy. I'm going to undo that, and now I want you to, this time, watch the Histogram as I slide to the right. You can see it is doing exactly what I would try to do if I was using manual controls. It's spreading the tones out across the tonal range. It's giving me true blacks. It's giving me more spread here in the middle, and the result, again, is an image that, before, very, very hazy. After, very good detail.

Now, it's not perfect, and in fact, it's done something that wouldn't have happened if I was using the normal way that I might use to correct this, which is to go back and manually adjust the black points. What's happened is all of this stuff up here has gotten this blueish teal color, but I can easily correct for that simply by going over here to my Saturation controls, clicking on my eyedropper thing here, clicking over here and dragging down to desaturate that color, and that puts it back.

As you can see, drains the blues out and puts it back to more of the kind of prairie color that it was before. So, I've done this correction here in two clicks basically. Two sliders: the Dehaze slider and then a desaturation. It would have been more difficult to do that with the full complex of contrast controls. I've been watching this tool quite a bit, trying to figure out what it's doing, and for the most part, as you saw in the Histogram, it's just making basic overall Histogram adjustments like you would with the normal tools, but because we saw that blue shift in there, that means I also know that it's operating on individual color channels in particular ways.

So it's doing a lot of sophisticated adjustment, what's nice is in its adjustment, it hasn't gone perfect throughout the image. If I look here in the foreground versus here in the background, the background's actually a little hazier than the foreground is which is great, and again, this is showing the sophistication of the algorithm. That means these dark tones here have darkened up more than these dark tones out there. That's something that might have been more difficult for me to do, or it may just be that because the background was hazier, it didn't get dehazed as much as the foreground.

I don't know. Whatever it's doing, it's working really well. I've seen some examples of people online using this for astrophotography, and it's amazing the amount of detail that it can bring out, removing atmospheric haze that you may not even know is there. So if you've got one of the more recent versions of Lightroom or Camera Raw, it's really worth looking into the Dehaze slider, not just for dehazing, but for simple contrast adjustments. You may find that it's a nice shortcut for a lot of the regular contrast adjustments that you normally do.