Practical De-hazing

If you ever go to a zoo, aquarium or any place that has you viewing animals behind plexiglass, then the new De-haze feature in Lightroom is perfect for you. I went out to Busch Gardens to shoot the animals… (fill in your own joke…) and just about every animal was behind the wonderful thick glass that a million kids and parents had made even better by smearing it with their handprints and other body parts. Most of the time the key is to try to find the cleanest/clearest sections, but I decided to see how good a job Lightroom can do with the dehazing. I took some shots through the worst glass I could find to see how far Lightroom could go in making me look better than I am.

Here is a shot I took through some of the crudiest section of the glass. This is untouched except for slight cropping. (Not a great picture, but great test shot.)

Straight out of camera…Major crud and haze from glass. I shall call her Maddie Haze (Cybill Shepherd Moonlighting reference :D)

Here is the result after doing nothing but cranking the Dehaze slider all the way to 100.

Much cleaner with nothing but dehaze applied.

To be honest, I thought it would do an ok job, but I was pretty impressed with the results. If nothing else it will help me from being that grumpy old guy with a camera at the Zoo telling the kids to stop smearing the glass :D. So here is the deal… I am sure you have some vacation photos of the zoo etc… siting on your harddrive. Why not pull them out and see if Lightroom can give them new life and maybe even inspire you to go out and shot some more animals yourself. (Yes I know I should say photograph animals… but I am a 12 year old boy trapped in a grown ups body and I still giggle at my own jokes.)