Removing Blue Haze

[Tiggy22]

I have taken several alpine landscape photos which have a blue haze in the background. I would like to know if it is possible to remove this haze to enhance the photo. I have read this post http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/10206-removing-blue-haze/but it does not help.

 

[Eli]

Hello Tiggy22,

 

If you post an image members may have a better idea of the kind of haze you want to remove.

 

But just in case this is your problem, you can adjust the colors with Auto-Level :

Edited July 18, 2015 by Eli

[Tiggy22]

I attach a typical photo showing the blue haze.  I have tried the Auto-level, but it alters the other colours..

Any help would be appreciated.

Also, can you change the Auto-level values?

[midora]

I woud say the colors of the photo are fine but it has been taken with the wrong focus point.

You may use Effect->Photo->Sharpen with the maximum value to improve the result. Maybe restrict sharpen to the far away landscape with a selection.

 

Use Adjustments-> Curves or Curves+ plugin to change the color levels. But this will not remove what you are calling haze.

[Eli]

The picture lacks contrast, the sky is covered with clouds and makes it look flat. It is a very difficult situation to take pictures. The haze is caused by the humidity in the air and since the mountains are very far the haze is more noticeable. If we increase the contrast cloud detail will be lost. If you follow midora's advice and apply TechnoRobbot's TR's Coquin Graduated Filter to darken the sky you can get something like this:

[racerx]

To correct that "Blue Haze", you need to work in the Blue Channel. You can do this with Curves +, Color Matrix or Channel Mix Effect. Here I used Channel Mix Effect...

 

[Cc4FuzzyHuggles]

I tried to take on the challenge of re-coloring the example picture you gave. The best way that I could think of to re-color the picture was to make a mask and use the Alpha Mask Plugin to separate the green area from the distant areas(blue hazy area), and then re-color the areas separately. Unfortunately, I'm not the best at making masks yet, so the edges, such as the tree-line edge, kept looking unnatural.

I personally am not satisfied with my attempts. However, if you are interested or would like to experiment with things yourself, I can give you the steps on how I made a mask, and then used the alpha mask plugin to separate the green area from the distant view area.
 
 
 Here are some of my re-color attempts.
http://s5.postimg.org/emqnphetz/Mountains_Photo_Recolor1.jpg    http://s5.postimg.org/loolboifr/Mountains_Photo_Recolor3.jpg
 
http://s5.postimg.org/4y8m8lumv/Mountains_Photo_Recolor4.jpg   http://s5.postimg.org/wfc7xcw2f/Mountains_Photo_Help_Layers_Sample.jpg
 

Here is an example of my layers. For a rough idea of what I did, you can see the Alpha Mask I made, which I used to cut out the Distant View part of the picture and the Green Area of the picture. I have each section on their own layer so that they could be re-colored or have effects applied to them without effecting each other. I then copy-merged the layers and applied a final brightness/contrast to enhance the overall visuals of the image. The clouds were easy as I simply duplicated the original image, auto-leveled them, and adjusted their brightness/contrast, then I used a soft medium/large eraser to erase everything except the clouds on the cloud layer.

http://s5.postimg.org/560uiuuzb/Mountains_Photo_Help_Layers_Sample1.jpg

[MJW]

This is quickly done, so it's far from perfect, but illustrates how I suggest it be done:

 

 

I separated the foreground and clouds into separate layers. The foreground was easy, just a click of the Magic Wand and a small tolerance adjustment. The clouds were more difficult, since they are sometimes hard to differentiate from the mountains. I copied the original image into a layer, used the Lasso to erase most of the area below the clouds, then used the Eraser to erase around the cloud edge. Once I had the foreground and sky in separate (higher, of course) layers. I adjusted the color and sharpness of each layer separately. I applied heavy feathering to the clouds, and lesser feathering to the foreground before flattening the image.

[MJW]

Sounds like Cc4FuzzyHuggles and I were working along the same lines. Cc seems to have gone for deeper contrast in the mountain area. It's hard to know what the original poster wanted in that regard.

Edited July 20, 2015 by MJW

[Cc4FuzzyHuggles]

@ MJW

Nice! Your way with the magic wand works way easier than trying to make a mask. I've been focusing on trying to improving my ability to make masks again lately, so I overlooked the easy answer haha.

 

As for re-coloring, I found that I like to Auto-Level, then Brightness/Contrast, then repeat and Auto-Level and Brightness/Contrast again. For the final brightness/contrast, after I Copy-Merged, I didn't lighten all of my sample images, but looking at them I think I should have.

Edited July 20, 2015 by Cc4FuzzyHuggles

[Ego Eram Reputo]

@MJW - Top effort!  The Mountains still look a little washed out.  Would you indulge me and try duplicating the mountain layer, then setting the top one to Multiply?  I just wondered if this would make the colors more vivid.

[MJW]

I may try to do it later. Unfortunately, I foolishly didn't think to save the separate layers, just the merged version. After seeing Cc's versions, I realized I probably should have punched up the mountains a bit more. There's a fine line between naturalistic and washed out.

Edited July 20, 2015 by MJW

[MJW]

Here's a very quickly done version using the multiply layer. To get the cloud layer, I pretty much just used the Magic Wand to select the clouds from my previous version, which actually seemed to work reasonably well. The multiply-layer opaqueness was set to 100. Higher opaqueness seemed to make the image a little dark. I do think the colors are somewhat improved. Using auto-level or something like that might improve the mountains further.

 

Edited July 20, 2015 by MJW

[MJW]

Yet another version, with the mountains enhanced using the Laplacian Pyramid plugin. Any anomalies, especially where the layers meet, are likely due to my haste.

 

Edited July 20, 2015 by MJW

[Tiggy22]

Thank you all for giving me your suggestions.  I will experiment and see how I go.