Hazy Aerial Photographs

Try playing with a curves adjustment layer.

Levels or Curves.

When there is too much contrast on photos I change the levels manually by moving the sliders on the left and right close to where the black part begins (play around with it) and it makes the image appear much cleaner than before.

Tina,

There is a sharpening brush included in the Photokit Sharpener plugin called the Hazecutter Brush. Not as good as shooting the originals on a clear day, but it might help you out. I’ve posted an example here <http://www.nickdeckerphoto.com/stuff/hazecutter.jpg> of what it does. What you see is the hazecutter brush applied (roughly) to the left side of the photo. Since it is a brush, you just paint it on to the areas that you want to clear up. You can also vary the intensity by adjusting the opacity of the layer that it works on.

You can find out more about Photokit Sharpener (by Bruce Fraser and company) here:

<http://www.pixelgenius.com/sharpener/>

Nick (not affiliated with the PixelGenius company)

It might be worth taking a look at the individual color channels. As I recall, mid-day haze is more pronounced in blue than the other channels (assuming you’re in RGB). Working just in the blue channel can reduce the amount of "collateral damage" to other parts of the image.

Here´s Nicks photo <http://www.96ppi.net/temp/haze.jpg> with a simple Levels adjustment. (whitepoint, blackpoint, blue midtone adjustment).

Mathias

I might’ve known that Danish whippersnapper would show me up again!

(Looks good, Mat. <g>)

Here’s another method:

Go to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. Set Amount to 20, Radius 50 to 70, and Threshold to 0. Play with the amount control and see what happens.

You need a bit of caution as too much starts showing slight halos at places where large value changes exist.

Don’t you call that "Contrast Coating" Mathias? 😉

Yes, Contrast Coating is my name for it 🙂