More Thoughts on The Lightroom Dehaze Control

With the dehaze adjustment in Lightroom (right) the sky and distant hills look good, but the foreground looks poor.

In my previous post I did say I’d be uploading another video reflecting my thoughts on the Lightroom/ACR dehaze adjustment.

And I’ve just done that – AND I’ve made a concious effort to keep the ramblings down too..!

In the video I look at the effects of the dehaze adjustment on 4 very different images, and alternative ways of obtaining similar or better results without it.

You may see some ‘banding’ on the third image I work on – this is down to YouTube video compression.

In conclusion I have to say that I find the dehaze ‘tool’ something of an anti-climax if I’m honest. In fairly small positive amounts it can work exceptionally well in terms of a quick work flow on relatively short dynamic range images. But I’m not a really big fan in general, and It’s possible to create pretty much the same adjustments using the existing Lightroom tools.

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The Lightroom Dehaze Control

I’m getting a bit fed up with seeing countless folk raving about this new dehaze slider control in Lightroom, ACR etc.

dehaze,lightroom,Andy Astbury,WildlifeinPixels

The control itself can be found at the bottom of the Effects panel in the Develop module in Lightroom CC 2015, and at the top of the ACR FX tab.

Yes it’s certainly useful, but I have yet to see anyone illustrating its bad points – so Uncle Andy has made a video: if you are reading this in email, click this link to watch the video https://www.wildlifeinpixels.net/blog/lightroom-dehaze/

I do tend to waffle a bit in videos so apologies for that…!

You might want to click the YouTube icon bottom right corner and watch this video at a larger size.

I’m not saying that the dehaze control in Lightroom and ACR is crap – far from it. But I am strongly advising that you deploy it with some caution, especially when images contain small fine edge detail.

Under these circumstances, positive value dehaze control adjustments can have disastrous effects on fine detail. You might not be aware of these ‘on screen’ but send the image to A2 print and you could be in for some tears.

I’ll be doing another video on the dehaze control shortly, showing some of the positives that I see in it.

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