Remove Smoke/Haze from Landscape Photos

[Gecko Girl]

Hi All,

I was just wondering if anyone has any knowledge on how to remove/improve smoke haze from landscape photos? I recently went on a trip to Central Australia only to find there were bushfires everywhere and so as a result there is a lot of smoke haze in my photos. Ugh! I am a beginner user of Photoshop CS5 and have limited skills thus far so any help would be appreciated. I have had a bit of a look through other threads but couldn't seem to find anything on this topic. Thanks!

[dbax]

yep, some where I have a tutorial( step by step instructions) for this. I 'll have to check through one or three hard drive to find it.
I put it up as soon as I find it unless some one beats me to it.
I'll get back to you

[Boo53]

I'm sorry the smoke was an issue. When we were there in July & August there was a heap of smoke but fortunately it seemed to get blown away from us during the day, except around Kings Canyon.

It hung around during the night though which played buggery with the sinus's when trying to sleep

I found a few tutorials on youtube a while back that give a good rundown on what is needed.

[dbax]

ok I cant find the tute I'm thinking of but one way to quickly reduce haze is to use unsharp mask (USM), its in the filters dropdown menu.
Duplicate your original on a new layer
Apply USM at settings 30, 60, 0 top slider to bottom
This should increase the contrast image wide and give an impression of less haze.
you can also work on various areas of the image using this technique using masks.
hope this helps to get you started

[WhoDo]

The method I use is Unsharp Mask (USM) at radius=50 and amount=12. That is effectively a local contrast enhancement that will remove the bulk of the blue haze you get with a lot of landscape shots. It is important to remember to do it fairly early in your pp workflow, though, because it can result in oversharpening if you've already used something like a high pass filter sharpen or an edge mask sharpen.

Hope that helps.

[Dylan & Marianne]

another way is to duplicate your layer, change the blend mode to soft light or overlay, desaturate the layer and the use a layer mask to apply the effect to where you want it in the picture. If it hasn't removed the haziness enough, you can duplicate the layer again and again - too many times though and you'll introduce artifact into the image.

[rocklogic]

ok I cant find the tute I'm thinking of but one way to quickly reduce haze is to use unsharp mask (USM), its in the filters dropdown menu.
Duplicate your original on a new layer
Apply USM at settings 30, 60, 0 top slider to bottom
This should increase the contrast image wide and give an impression of less haze.
you can also work on various areas of the image using this technique using masks.
hope this helps to get you started

Thanks for that! I did a quickie this morning and it did remove some smoke! I'll play around with it a bit more come this weekend!

Thanks!

[ameerat42]

Post one up. I'd like to look at the different channels. Apart from the methods mentioned above, look to see what contrast enhancement alone can do. What editing software do you have? Do you shoot raw? What does your raw converter do?