Lightroom's (And Adobe Camera Raw) Dehaze Slider; Kind of Magical!

Fujifilm X-T1, 55-200mm lens @ 95mm; 1/500th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200; JPEG w/Standard Film Simulation (click to enlarge)
ACR/Lightroom Develop Module used for conversion with the Dehaze slider to increase contrast, color and eliminate
the haze from the dirty office window.

Same image as it came out of the camera (click to enlarge)

Have you tried the Dehaze slider in ACR or Lightroom?  If not, you should.  I started playing with it when Lightroom CC 2015 was released and found it a very versatile and valuable addition to my box of image editing tools.

I believe the new Dehaze slider should not be relegated to just landscape and nature images where there can be significant haze across a countryside.  I made this image from my office window through some very dirty glass.  In fact, the window is "clean" in the traditional sense, but there is some sort of debris from the floating drydock across the river that does not come off the window.  I was told the windows have to be replaced as they can't be cleaned economically.

The only difference between these two images is a) the Dehaze slider was utilized and b) because using the Dehaze slider darkens the image somewhat, I lightened the edited image with the Exposure slider by 1 stop in Lightroom's Develop module.  Other than that, nothing has been done to change the image.  By the way, this is a JPEG from my Fujifilm X-T1 with  "STD" rendering.

In this case, I was able to salvage this image in a matter of seconds with one or two sliders in Lightroom.  A nice shortcut and elimination of a lot of work trying to hit the right combination manually.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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