How to Remove Haze in Post Processing

After a day of capturing images of lakes, forests, or mountains, you might run into the problem of haze removal. A soft haze can add visual drama and depth to a photograph, but it also can get in the way. For haze removal, you will need to turn to post processing. In this premium video lesson Outdoor Photography Guide’s David Johnston takes you through the process of haze removal with his wide angle image of trees in Great Smoky National Park.

If you are shooting with a telephoto lens from a great distance, this photographic approach will allow you to separate one object from another, but it will also bring up the problem of haze removal. David illustrates with his photo of a tree-line that kind of flattens out due to the haze.

In Lightroom, he turns to the Dehaze slider. Moving the slider to the right removes the haze and adds depth and clarity to the tree-line. Since haze removal affects the mood and tone of an image, you need to be careful on how you adjust the slider. Basically, warm tones versus cool tones.

The Dehaze slider affects the overall image, meaning you need to use other editing tools for specific adjustments. David warms up his trees with the Tone tool, and he enhances the contrast to bring out more depth. He reduces the highlights and the whites because the haze removal tool made his image overly bright.

In haze removal, your main effort should be to play around with the editing tools to arrive at an image you are satisfied with. These might include your luminance, hue and saturation sliders.

In this premium video lesson Outdoor Photography Guide’s David Johnston guides you through the complete process of using editing tools for haze removal on images where you want to add depth and clarity.