Oh gurus of the post processing :-) A little help?

[kc0nxd]

Ok enough sucking up :-)

I have many many images of the areas surrounding my home here in Colorado. However, many of the photos have a slight fog or haze to them. This haze is there in the landscape and appears often in the mornings.

So now two questions:

1. If possible how do i remove the haze.
2. Is there a way to prevent capturing the haze in the first place?

Maybe someone could give post processing a try and post the results/procedure?

Here is one of the photos that i was concerned about:

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/2564037-md.jpg

You can see the haze on the rock face in the backround although only slight in this image. This image has NO post processing.

[dsze]

Nice photo... great color, especially with no processing yet. That haze is going to be touch to get rid of and accurately keep the detail behind it in my experience. Hopefully, someone here who knows more will have a good method for you. Maybe try working with separate layers an adjusting curves in one of the layer to get rid of the haze and then blending the layers. ?? I'm not sure.

You might try some different filters on your lens when shooting. ??

-daniel

[Scottes]

Haze is tough. A *very good* UV filter can help a bit. Look for one that actually does something, not just one that says it does.

A polarizer may help a little, too.

But the best bet is to not take pictures on a hazy day. :(


From a Photoshop point of view, haze removes contrast. So add contrast. This image (which I like a lot) is tough. The histogram is wall-to-wall and you have little room to add contrast. Levels won't cut it at all, really, which leaves Curves. But you've got a large range of color because the day was so bright and you have a lot of sunlight coming through the trees, and not so much on the backs of the trees or rocks.

So isolate.

I did a Select... Color Range on a dark part of the rocks and increased fuzziness so that I had all the dark sections selected. Then I used Lasso and Alt-Selected anything not rocks. Holding down the Alt key while Selecting will subtract these areas from the current selection. So I had rocks left, and I choose Select... Feather with a radius of 0.5 for an image this size. Then I hit Ctrl-H to hide the selection.

Now I could use Levels or Curves, since the Histogram of the selected area was much much smaller than the entire picture's histogram. So I stretched things a bit, and increased contrast in the rocks.

This image is large and doesn't compress well because of all the leaves, so I cropped to the rocks:

http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/2564037-mdrocks.jpg

This isn't perfect, but it doesn't look hazy any more, because it now has contrast.

Alas, haze also destroys details, and so does underexposure - luckily the rocks don't need to show a lot of detail. While the rocks aren't actually underexposed they are some of the darkest parts of the picture, and there's less detail that can't be captures in that section of the sensor.

[kc0nxd]

Scottes, the PS you did looks much better and did not take long at all "I'm impressed".

I wish i could just not take any photos with the haze but sometimes the lighting is just too excellent. The haze really appears on larger landscape shots of the mountains and can many times be very prevalent in the images taken.

Problem here is that to get the nice pics of the mountains the sun rises in the east and shines on the moutains to the west of me. and the early morning light is awesome. So trying to figure out the best options for taking the pics and still getting a nice pic out of it.

When you have a model as good as mother nature you just have to take the shot :-)

Many thanks for the replys.

[robertwgross]

Nice composition. If I am facing haze, I generally just goose the contrast up higher by 10% per step. In this case, I would try to select the hazy part only and then do it to just that part.

Last year, I had to shoot some very colorful objects through an extremely dirty and dusty glass window. At first, the objects looked terrible. Then I simply kept bringing up the contrast until it looked normal.

---Bob Gross---

[CyberDyneSystems]

I had a crack at it too...

Levels.. shadow recovery.. and a little selctive color.

I forgot to try a little USM though.. might help.


Hosted on fotopic so CLICK the image for the real deal.
http://images1.fotopic.net/?iid=y3wdco&outx=680&oq=0&original=1&noresize=1&no stamp=1

[Roger_Cavanagh]

One of the best ways to remove haze is to use USM with a small amount around 15 and a large radius, which could be anything from 30 to 250 and 0 threshold.

Sometimes this is called local contrast enhancement and there's an action somewhere called The Clarifier, but I don't have time to dig the URL out - wife calling. :)

Regards,

[kc0nxd]

Thanks much for the many replys. I will try some of those techniques. As i do not have PS i will try the same in Gimp (poor mans PS) and see if i can get similar results.

Again Thanks,

KC0NXD