How can I reduce blue atmospheric haze in landscape photos during post-processing?

Question

I have some landscape photos shot on a bright sunny day where distant hills and rocks look washed out, low-contrast, and noticeably blue from atmospheric haze. I’m not asking how to prevent this in-camera—I already have the files and want to improve them in post.

I’ve tried boosting contrast and exposure in Darktable, which helped reveal some rock detail, but it also caused halos along the ridge, made parts of the image too dark, and introduced odd cyan tones. Warming the white balance helped a little, but made the clouds look dirty.

What post-processing approach works best for recovering contrast and reducing the blue cast from haze, especially using free tools such as Darktable or GIMP?

user2910 · Accepted Answer

I usually use this technique for pictures taken through windows, but I think it works here, too. In GIMP, I go to Colors | Curves and change the slope of the curve to use all of the available color information:

increasing contrast in GIMP

I like to set the new start/end points for the curve to where the little black line along the bottom of the curves starts and ends. Usually changing the curves for the whole picture works best (and is easiest), but for this picture I found that applying that adjustment to each of the curves (Red, Blue, and Green) instead worked best: adjusted image

I selected 'convert' when opening the image to convert the image from DarkTable sRGB to sRGB; I have no idea if that had any effect.

How can I reduce blue atmospheric haze in landscape photos during post-processing?

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