Dehazing Piping Plovers

During the recent Piping Plover workshop with Michale Milica, one of the mornings we were faced with fairly foggy conditions. Take a look at the following image. Yes, there's lot's of distracting beach vegetation, but the real image killer is the fog.

At the time, Lightroom Creative Cloud had just been released, and it featured a funky new "dehaze" tool - those on the course speculated that images from the morning's shoot would be a very interesting test for this new feature. Annoyingly, the dehaze function is not going to be added to the stand alone version, and so for sometime I'd held off downloading the CC version. Well, earlier this weekend I did, and wow!! It certainly transforms a picture, wiping away the fog, stretching out the tone curve and boosting saturation. Same image, where the main change is moving the dehaze slider (ok, I also "cleaned-up" the beach debris a little, and tweaked it a bit with Nik Filters). Looking at the final image, I feel the darks have blocked up a bit, so I may have to revisit this at some future point.

Piping Plover, North Shore of Massachusetts

There's some clever Adobe magic at work here, although I should add that I know those more versed in the inner workings of LR and Photoshop can achieve very similar results without a simple slider. I'm just not that familiar with either tool.