Removing Haze from your Photos in Lightroom

What is Haze?

Haze is a smoggy look your photo will get when you shoot in hot weather eg. summer, shoot into the sun or shoot in an area where is bad pollution. It also appears in photos when you shoot through a window or glass as it causes the catches some light and therefore creates a haze in your photo.

Here are some examples of images that suffer from this:

You can try to fix them using a UV Filter or Circular Polarising Filter at the time of capture but its not a guaranteed fix. Or if you are like me you don’t want additional cheap glass in front of your very expensive glass of the Lens and fiddle around with attaching/removing filters. The only time I use filter is for Long Exposure photography which can’t be done without a filter, at least not during the day.

Removing Haze is Easy

Removing Haze from these photos is easy, once you know how to do it and can be done with just adjusting a few sliders in the Develop Module. There are four main adjustments that will get rid of Haze from your images: Contrast, Clarity, Whites and Blacks. The reason why image is appearing like this is because it lacks these items. So if we add more of what is lacking it should adjust the image and give us a more clean image. Note that if you shoot in RAW you have lot of information in the image to edit and rectify but if you shoot in JPEG then you less information in the image to work with it. You will still get a good result.

Check out the final results below and their individual settings. You only need to adjust the four sliders and my order in which I work on them is:

1. Whites – set a white point in the image
2. Blacks – set a black point in the image
3. Clarity – add clarity in the image which will add micro contrast
4. Contrast – add a more liberal contrast to the whole image.