ESFotoClix Blog

Have you ever stood before a gorgeous landscape and wondered whether you should even take the photo because haze is concealing far away detail and creating a scene with very low contrast? I was faced with such a situation this last summer in King’s Canyon National Park, where heavy smoke from a nearby fire was killing many of the shots I wanted to take. Fortunately, I took this shot anyway.

As you can see, haze from the smoke is creating a very flat image, and this pretty much remains the case, even after applying one of my favorite curves.

Next, I applied a technique that I’ve found useful in adding contrast in my B&W conversions. I duplicated the image into another layer, and set the top (foreground) layer to multiply mode. Usually I reduce the multiplication effect by lowering opacity on the top layer to 30-50%, but in this case, I left it at 100%. Where did the haze go?

As you can see, the image has a lot more pop than the original. This is how I wanted it to look when I first pressed the shutter, and here it is, after some fairly simple post processing — something the camera couldn’t do, by the way. With this version in hand, I wondered whether a B&W conversion would work for this subject. Since now I have nice delineation of forms and good shadow and light contrasts, it has potential. After some channel mixing, the following version results.

This version is okay, but it is a little flat for my taste. Repeating the layer multiplication trick, this time with 60% opacity, a version with a little more pop and none of the original haze results.

I’m not sure this is exactly where I want to go with these images, but at the outset, this technique seems very promising for improving contrast and, in this case, removing that pesky haze. Give it a try and see what results you get for your so-so, flat images.