How to de-haze or moisture?

[blackstar]

Not sure if it's haze or moisture coming up from the river just below. But the shots all came out with the horrible foggy tone from this scene (1) vs all shots clear from the upper tree scene (2). What are your possible remedies for clearing up in PP? The posted images below are all original unprocessed but scaled.

(1)

(2)

 

[Clovishound]

I ran this through Topaz to sharpen, although that probably won't make much difference to the haze effect, and probably not necessary with the full resolution original image. I then imported into Lightroom and gave it a bunch of dehaze slider. I then did a quick mask on the dark portions of the birds and tried bringing up the exposure and details. I did a little more fussing around with shadows, blacks, whites and individual colors. It could use more work, as I only spent a few minutes on it. Dehaze was what really made the difference. I didn't completely get rid of the haziness, but it definitely improved it. Spending a little more time masking and playing around with things would undoubtedly improve it.

 

[BF Hammer]

RawTherapee has a de-haze tool. It will mostly crank up the contrast and black level. I don't touch it much. Maybe try stretching exposure in GIMP... I'm going to give it a try now.

 

[BF Hammer]

Yes, doing an exposure stretch similar to how I enhance astrophotography images looks like a good way here.

What it involves is the Color Levels tool (in GIMP, have no idea what they call it in Adobe-speak) where you see the histogram and a slider with 3 pointers on it. Move the left and right pointers in close to the histogram ends (black level and white level), and the entire exposure level is adjusted with the center pointer. It compresses the exposure range and helps get rid of the unwanted hazy interference.

 

[Fred Kingston]

Lightroom... pushed clarity and about 1/2 of Dehaze... Tweaked the contrast and exposure, and a bit of saturation...and of course, I'm duty bound to hit it with a bit of Topaz sgarpening... Could have done better with a RAW file...

 

[blackstar]

Thank you guys. I did this: RawT De-haze, Gimp tone curve, Topaz DN, and color balance. But I like Clovishound's color rendition best.