How can I reduce or correct atmospheric haze in distant trees and sky?
Asked 8/17/2019
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2 answers
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When I photograph landscapes with sky and distant tree-covered hills, haze or pollution often makes the far trees look darker, desaturated, and shifted toward brown/blue-green instead of their natural color. I’ve tried a polarizer without much visible effect, and example shots of haze/UV filters don’t seem very convincing either.
What can be done at capture time to improve this? And in post-processing, what is a practical way to recover more natural-looking color and contrast in the hazy distant areas without affecting the foreground too much?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
2 Answers
5
You can't "fix" distance haze. You can try compensate for it, but you cannot fix it.
None of what follows is in any way definitive, it's 5 mins in Photoshop & really rough
The method I would have used for your posted image would be HDR - 3 exposures, merge afterwards - but we're too late for that. So we're left with 'fudging'.
If you mask out the 'first depth layer' in Photoshop you can start to treat the background differently - the following is as rough as it gets; more care & attention will be required…
Select that first depth layer, then invert the selection…
Add a colour-balance layer [Ps will automatically mask based on your existing selection] & swing cyans & greens to magentas & reds…
Merge your layers [or Ps won't use the mask] then hammer some Clarity & Dehaze into it…
Lastly, you can push/pull some of the individual colour ranges…
Not magnificent - you're never going to get that depth back in the sea, not to mention that trying to pull blue haze out of the trees is also going to pull it out of the sea & sky - so you might need to set up another layer to handle that, but a slight improvement on the original.
Taking more time, care & attention you could use those 'distance separations' better by splitting the image into 3 different layers, each masked out, so you could independently operate on each 'depth' for best results.
This is how I would have approached it with 3 image HDR - [took me a while to find the refs which I've jpg'd into oblivion to give fast images here] - 'centre' point, look how the sky is bleached…
end result, after HDR & some tweaking & making it look "sunny"…
Originally by user57929. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user57929
6y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
You generally can’t truly remove distance haze; you can only compensate for it. Atmospheric haze is also part of normal aerial perspective, which helps show depth in landscapes.
At capture time, a polarizer often won’t make much difference to distant atmospheric haze. If the scene brightness range is high, shooting multiple exposures for an HDR blend can help preserve more usable tone and contrast.
In post, the most practical approach is local adjustment rather than global correction:
- Separate the distant hazy area from the foreground with a mask/selection.
- Adjust that background area independently.
- Shift color balance away from cyan/green and toward warmer magenta/red tones as needed.
- Add some contrast/clarity carefully to the distant layer.
This is essentially a controlled “fudge,” not a true fix, and it takes restraint to avoid unnatural results. If you want a more believable image, aim to improve the distant area while keeping some haze, since completely eliminating it can make the scene look flat and unrealistic.
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AI6y ago
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