September 11, 2021
Haze Removal
(Technical Post)
One of the challenges I face, especially shooting cityscapes is the haze that's usually present in Los Angeles. While Los Angeles is well know for its smog, we are also a coastal city and do get our share of haze from the Pacific. Haze can be useful in some cases to provide some drama to a shot, especially if it's thick enough to be fog, but generally it's just muddies distant detail. When I first started using Lightroom a few years ago, I used and abused the "Dehaze" slider and produced results that were pretty unsatisfying. As I learned more about processing photos, I'd apply it as a graduated filter just affecting the top portion of the photo, also with somewhat unsatisfying results. The ability to limit these changes to areas in the photo that are light or dark improved things somewhat, but still with less than perfect results.
Photoshop has the advantage of targeting changes to specific areas of a photo using masks(black conceals, white reveals) for any changes you want to make in a photo and has the ability to dehaze via the Camera RAW filter(it pretty much has the same features as Lightroom). However, you'd have to create the mask from the ground up. About a year ago, Adobe introduced what they call "Neural Filters" in Photoshop. These filters are cloud based using Adobe's servers to do some of the processing and include colorization, some portrait tools and depth blur so you can blur the background and keep the subject in focus. Depth blur in these neural filters doesn't work all that great, but it does include the ability to produce a depth map. Now I'm quite familiar with depth maps from my work with 3d photos. It's a black and white image where things that are closer to the camera are black and things further away are white. I thought, why not use the depth map in conjunction with the dehaze filter? Turns out it works pretty well, not perfect, but it can generally reduce haze in a photo by quite a bit without making the foreground look horrid. Since I'm applying the filter with a depth mask, I can modify the mask to not include certain things, like the sky(which dehaze makes look just awful). One other thing you can do with a depth map is create 3d photos using the depth map and it's corresponding 2d photo. I've applied it to a number of my cityscapes shot in the last 5 years and to one of my photos of Mt. Whitney shot in February of last year.
This set is a group of after/before photos. The "before" photos have been processed in Lightroom and the "after" photos I've used this technique on. I'll be highlighting a few of the photos below, but the remainder will be in a link to a page on my site. The shots are pairs with the first shot being the revised shot and the second being the original shot.
Read More(Technical Post)
One of the challenges I face, especially shooting cityscapes is the haze that's usually present in Los Angeles. While Los Angeles is well know for its smog, we are also a coastal city and do get our share of haze from the Pacific. Haze can be useful in some cases to provide some drama to a shot, especially if it's thick enough to be fog, but generally it's just muddies distant detail. When I first started using Lightroom a few years ago, I used and abused the "Dehaze" slider and produced results that were pretty unsatisfying. As I learned more about processing photos, I'd apply it as a graduated filter just affecting the top portion of the photo, also with somewhat unsatisfying results. The ability to limit these changes to areas in the photo that are light or dark improved things somewhat, but still with less than perfect results.
Photoshop has the advantage of targeting changes to specific areas of a photo using masks(black conceals, white reveals) for any changes you want to make in a photo and has the ability to dehaze via the Camera RAW filter(it pretty much has the same features as Lightroom). However, you'd have to create the mask from the ground up. About a year ago, Adobe introduced what they call "Neural Filters" in Photoshop. These filters are cloud based using Adobe's servers to do some of the processing and include colorization, some portrait tools and depth blur so you can blur the background and keep the subject in focus. Depth blur in these neural filters doesn't work all that great, but it does include the ability to produce a depth map. Now I'm quite familiar with depth maps from my work with 3d photos. It's a black and white image where things that are closer to the camera are black and things further away are white. I thought, why not use the depth map in conjunction with the dehaze filter? Turns out it works pretty well, not perfect, but it can generally reduce haze in a photo by quite a bit without making the foreground look horrid. Since I'm applying the filter with a depth mask, I can modify the mask to not include certain things, like the sky(which dehaze makes look just awful). One other thing you can do with a depth map is create 3d photos using the depth map and it's corresponding 2d photo. I've applied it to a number of my cityscapes shot in the last 5 years and to one of my photos of Mt. Whitney shot in February of last year.
This set is a group of after/before photos. The "before" photos have been processed in Lightroom and the "after" photos I've used this technique on. I'll be highlighting a few of the photos below, but the remainder will be in a link to a page on my site. The shots are pairs with the first shot being the revised shot and the second being the original shot.
