Applying Photoshop’s Dehaze On a Haze-Free Image Yields Spectacular Results
Jun 18, 2015
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
Share:
The latest release of Adobe CC has brought with it a number of exciting updates to the world’s most popular image editing and creative publishing suite. Among those updates is the new “dehaze” feature in both Lightroom and Photoshop Camera Raw. While various techniques have perviously existed to accomplish the same thing, now users have a simplified and intuitive process for eliminating that annoying haze and breathing more life into their photos.
Though it is almost as interesting to see what applying dehaze on an (almost) haze free photo will do. Reddit user Mefaso shared his experiment and I have to admit that it is quite awesome if not over done.
The original image was shot in raw, and while Mefaso admits that he overdid the effect, the results are quite dramatic. Due to the lack of haze in the original, the software managed to squeeze out a bit of overcompensation. You can see dramatic noise increase in the sky, and the middle of the image is too dark to achieve seamless believability. These issues, however, can be corrected with a few adjustments or layer masking, if desired.
Since the feature has just hit the public, we have yet to see a large influx in examples using it, but we anticipate this feature being one of the most used (and, undoubtedly, overused) within the software update.
[Images from Mefaso]
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
Join the Discussion
DIYP Comment Policy
Be nice, be on-topic, no personal information or flames.
9 responses to “Applying Photoshop’s Dehaze On a Haze-Free Image Yields Spectacular Results”
it’s almost like that “make beautiful” slider that lazy photographers have been crying out for!
I am not Lightroom user, so I can’t try it by myself, so, can anyone can explain me: how is it better, than revealing detail, using curves?
The example shown look, like you simply cranked up the contrast and saturation sliders. As Well, it looks, like there is graduated filter applied, to darken skies, but it is applied not only to skys, but the top part of the field too…
It’s a little clearer what’s going on when it’s applied to a photo that actually has haze. Howard Pinksy has a good look at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpQUsrqg4Y
Nope, still don’t see, how this has better results, than curves. Other, than making it more convinient…
My understanding is it works only on areas that have low contrast, so it could be done with other methods but it would require masking.
I tried it out on a water shot and it cut some of the glare off the water, almost exactly as if I’d used a circular polarizer on my lens.
A kick in the a** to all Lightoom 6 customers.
it does look like a neat example but the first image does appear to have a Haze. (well, on my MacBook Pro monitor it does) and though the field contrast intensity seems as to be expected when boosting something like curves/contrast/etc. the sky is somewhat surprising as I did not see any bits of those colors in the first. but this is an interesting take on an image.
I tried it out yesterday with fog, not haze. It did a very good job of cutting through it, although the non-foggy (higher contrast) part of the image had a HDR feel to it.