{"id":1191,"date":"2010-05-01T12:04:27","date_gmt":"2010-05-01T20:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/01\/photoshop-tutorial-atmospheric-haze\/"},"modified":"2018-09-09T19:44:33","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T03:44:33","slug":"photoshop-tutorial-atmospheric-haze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/01\/photoshop-tutorial-atmospheric-haze\/","title":{"rendered":"Photoshop Tutorial – Atmospheric Haze"},"content":{"rendered":"

Haze is an integral part of landscape photography.\u00a0 Distant mountains are not as clear as close up objects.\u00a0 They lack contrast, are often lighter and may even appear blue or even purple (purple mountain majesty).\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that in the history of Western art, painters didn\u2019t incorporate atmosphere into their paintings with landscapes until the Renaissance.<\/p>\n

Atmosphere lends depth to an image.\u00a0 We know from our experience with objects that they loose detail the farther they are from us.\u00a0 Where I live in Southern California, we have one of the Channel Islands 26 miles off the coast \u2013 Santa Catalina.\u00a0 On many days we can\u2019t even see it \u2013 even on sunny days.\u00a0 There is so much haze in the atmosphere that it\u2019s not even visible.\u00a0 On other days it\u2019s a pale blob on the horizon.\u00a0 But there area a few special days every year where the air is perfectly clear and you\u2019ll hear people say, \u201cCatalina looks so close you feel like you can reach out and touch it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haze isn\u2019t necessarily all smog, not even in Southern California.\u00a0 Water vapor in the atmosphere produces haze.\u00a0 Blowing dust and smoke from wild fires (for which we make the national news every fall) also create atmospheric haze.\u00a0 You can tell what\u2019s causing the haze from its color.\u00a0 If the haze is blue, it\u2019s water vapor.\u00a0 If it\u2019s brown or red then smog, blowing dust, or smoke is your best bet.<\/p>\n

We all love those days when you can \u2018reach out and touch\u2019 distant islands or mountains.\u00a0 And that raises a question regarding post processing; namely, \u201cIs it possible to remove the atmospheric haze and make distant objects look closer?\u201d\u00a0 And the answer is \u201cYes it is.\u201d\u00a0 So let\u2019s take a look at how we can do that.\u00a0 We\u2019ll start with a photograph taken at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park in California.<\/p>\n

\"Zabriskie<\/a><\/p>\n

The foreground is the badlands of Zabriskie Point and the background is Telescope Peak and the Panamint Range.\u00a0 A quick look demonstrates the point I made above; namely, the foreground is clearer with greater contrast and the background is hazy with a cool tint.\u00a0 But let\u2019s take a deeper look.\u00a0 The shadows in the background are bluish while those in the foreground aren\u2019t.\u00a0 In fact, if we use the Color Sampler Tool in Photoshop and sample a few select locations we can clearly see from the RGB numbers what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

\"original_image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first sample was taken of the big shadow in the background.\u00a0 The RGB numbers are 88, 91 and 94 respectively.\u00a0 The red at 88 is less then the green indicating a little cyan (the opposite of red) while the blue at 94 is greater than the green indicating a little blue.\u00a0 So the distant shadow is a pale shade of blue.<\/p>\n

The second sample was taken in the foreground shadow.\u00a0 The RGB numbers are 32, 27 and 28.\u00a0 The green and blue numbers are practically the same but the red number is higher indicating the shadow is a little red.\u00a0 This makes sense in light of the third sample which is of the sunlit foreground.\u00a0 The RGB colors are 153, 96 and 43, making the color red plus yellow \u2013 or orange.\u00a0 So the foreground shadow is not as orange as it\u2019s sunlit counterpart but it\u2019s still red.<\/p>\n

The lesson to come away with here is that there isn\u2019t enough atmosphere to affect the foreground shadows but the background shadows are far enough way to be turned blue.<\/p>\n

The other thing you will notice is that the contrast between highlights and shadows in the foreground is much greater than in the background.\u00a0 The background shadow is much lighter than the foreground one \u2013 88, 91, 94 compared to 32, 27, 28.\u00a0 (Remember, in this scale 0, 0, 0 is black and 255, 255, 255 is white.)\u00a0 And although I didn\u2019t measure the background highlight, we can see that the contrast in the foreground is quite pronounced \u2013 32, 27, 28 to 153, 96, 43.<\/p>\n

Adjust Luminosity<\/h5>\n

The first step in dealing with atmospheric haze is to adjust the luminosity of the background.\u00a0 We want to increase the contrast by darkening the shadows.\u00a0 For this we\u2019ll create a curve layer.\u00a0 We darkened the shadows in the canyons without changing the highlights on the ridges.\u00a0 A layer mask is created to limits the effect of the adjustment to the distant range and sky.\u00a0 The result is an image where the atmosphere looks clearer but it\u2019s still a bit confusing.\u00a0 The enhanced contrast suggests the atmosphere is clearer but the blue cast suggests it\u2019s not.\u00a0 This is sunrise and the warm, golden light of sunrise would be nice.<\/p>\n

\"zabriskie_point_1_luminance\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adjust Hue and Saturation<\/h5>\n

The next adjustment we want to make is to the hue and saturation of the background.\u00a0 For that we\u2019ll create a Hue\/Saturation layer.\u00a0 We want to neutralize the blue haze and warm the highlights.\u00a0 This also leverages the fact that warm colors seem to advance and cool colors retreat.\u00a0 So to bring the distant range even closer we\u2019ll saturate the reds and desaturate the blues.\u00a0 Again, a layer mask is applied that restricts the changes to the background and sky.<\/p>\n

\"zabriskie_point_2_hr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The result is pretty striking.\u00a0 Below are the original and adjusted images side by side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

\"zabriskie_point_0\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\"zabriskie_point_2_hr\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

There\u2019s still work to do on the image but with the adjustments made so far a nice morning was turned into one of those rare mornings where you can reach out and touch the mountains.<\/p>\n

To see more of my photographs click here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Join me on an upcoming workshop.<\/a><\/p>\n

(6234)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haze is an integral part of landscape photography.\u00a0 Distant mountains are not as clear as close up objects.\u00a0 They lack contrast, are often lighter and may even appear blue or even purple (purple mountain majesty).\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that in the history of Western art, painters didn\u2019t incorporate atmosphere into their paintings with landscapes until the … Continue reading “Photoshop Tutorial – Atmospheric Haze”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[32,87,13,48,10,268,93],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-how-to-articles","tag-california","tag-death-valley","tag-photography","tag-photoshop","tag-ralph-nordstrom","tag-tips","tag-workshop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Nl7-jd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3979,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/3979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}