December 17, 2006: Photoshop: Haze Removal
Another Ace up your Photoshop sleeve!
Posted on 2006-12-17 21:47 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
While I’m on the subject of Photoshop: While editing pictures – especially those coming from digital cameras – I’ve often felt that they needed just a tiny bit of extra “punch”. But I’ve never really managed to get it right. You can always increase contrast by adjusting levels, moving the white and black points inwards. And you can use Shadow/Highlight’s Midtone Contrast settings, but that almost never looks good.
Then I found the haze removal trick (see also the other two web pages linked to at the end of that article – all of them link to each other) – which uses Unsharp Mask with extreme values, but extreme in the other end of the scale than you first might think: Small amount (10%), BIG radius (around 50 px), zero threshold.
This increases contrast, but does so locally instead of for the picture as a whole. The effect is quite a bit different, and I find that using this trick adds a lot of depth—it makes objects in pictures “pop out” more. Everything just looks more three-dimensional.
Here’s a small demonstration of this technique, using one of my own pictures from Flickr and some Javascript mouseover code (not tested in multiple browsers). This one has had the technique applied—mouse over to see original image.
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