How do I cope with haze for the photos containing sky and trees at a distance?x
I'm always struggling with photos which contain large zones with trees situated far away from the camera. Haze and pollution cause severe changes in colors, which means that the trees lose their natural light orange-green color, and appear in a sort of brownish green-blue color, darker and desaturated.
Here's an example. The photo itself is bad, and is used purely to illustrate what I mean by the change in the color:
Here's the original photo in DNG format.
Questions:
Is there anything to do to improve the photos during the shooting?
I tried to use a polarizer filter, but haven't noticed any difference.
I know that there are haze filters, but looking at the comparison photos, I'm not particularly impressed. For instance, here, the right photo has the same unnatural color both for the sky and for the trees.
How such photos can be recovered in Lightroom or Photoshop to get more natural colors?
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2"... to get more natural colors?" In a sense, the haze is natural and eliminating the influence of haze that is there when the photo is captured is unnatural. Do you mean you wish to match the colors of the trees much farther away to the colors of the trees much closer to the camera? – Michael C 8 hours ago
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1One method of reducing this haze is to wait for an abnormally clear day. – Mike Sowsun 8 hours ago
1 Answer
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.
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"…
