Many of Adobe Lightroom’s tools and features are designed to help you save time, especially when it comes to your post-wedding workflow. Many available features in Lightroom, however, can be difficult to master. This is especially true when it comes to learning how to dehaze in Lightroom. Even if you have your images edited by photo editing companies, such as ShootDotEdit, it can still be valuable to learn more about the process in Lightroom.
How to Dehaze in Lightroom
Many photographers love Lightroom’s cataloging and organization features to keep a streamlined workflow. What you may not appreciate is the tedious steps needed to make edit your images. And though a photo editing service can take care of the majority of wedding edits, there are still elements you may want to take care of or require you to be knowledgeable about (like how to whiten teeth or blur the background in Lightroom). Keep reading to learn more about the dehaze tool and how to use it in Lightroom on your wedding photography.
What Is the Dehaze Tool?
Dehaze is a tool that was added to Adobe Lightroom in 2015. It offers wedding photographers an easy way to even out the light quality in hazy photos. Before this tool was added, there were 2 other ways to dehaze photos in Lightroom: by buying a dehaze preset or by fiddling with the lighting in the photo to dehaze the photo yourself.
Dehaze Presets
Presets were originally the simplest way to dehaze a photo if you did not want to do so manually. You could simply purchase a preset that offered a dehazing effect and apply that preset to all your hazy photos.
The biggest downfall to this method was that not every preset was perfect for every photo. The dehazing settings in each preset would work well for one photo and not necessarily for others.
Related: What’s the best way to use presets for your photography? Find out here!
Manually Dehaze
Before the dehaze tool, another way to dehaze your photos was by manually changing the lighting settings on your photos to reduce the haziness.
This gave photographers the most control over photos, but it was also extremely time-consuming. Many felt that the level of control was too good to give up in exchange for ease of use and convenience, so they were forced to spend hours manually editing their photos. And here at ShootDotEdit, we believe in outsourcing photo editing to specialists so you can save time and focus your efforts on more important aspects of your photography business (rather than spending your time sitting in front of the computer for hours on end).
Adobe Lightroom Dehaze Tool
Finally, Adobe created the dehaze tool for Lightroom. This tool now allows you to dehaze your wedding images by simply sliding a button on a slider bar. The tool is relatively easy to use and takes only a few steps to edit the haziness out of photos from start to finish.
Why Dehaze Your Photos?
Both daytime and nighttime weddings are riddled with poor lighting conditions. While sunlight and additional lighting offer more control over the light quality in photos, glare can often be a problem. At night, fluorescent lighting and bright floodlights can create a hazy glow in your images.
The 3 main reasons photographers dehaze their photos include: highlighting sharp lines and clear subjects, enhancing colors, and creating structure in a photo.
Create Sharp Lines and Clear Subjects
Haze is one of the quickest ways to dull lines and allow subjects to blend into a background. It is often easy to lose your subject in a hazy photo. Reducing haze can help your subjects stand out.
Boost Saturated Colors
The bride and groom likely spent a lot of time deciding on the colors of flowers, cummerbunds, and bridesmaid dresses for hours. Those colors are an important part of the wedding day story. Dehazing photos can allow the saturation of colors to shine through.
Enhance the Photo’s Structure
If there is no distinction between the groom’s mother and the bride’s mother, it can cause confusion in your images. Dehazing can help to create structure in your photos and will highlight the subjects in the photo.
Tips for Learning How to Dehaze
- Play with the dehaze slider bar to get an idea of how this feature works.
- Save a copy of your photos so you do not lose your original work.
- Do not be afraid to get creative when it comes to the dehaze bar; experiment with what happens when you slide the bar all the way to the right, or all the way to the left.
How to Dehaze in Lightroom: Step-by-Step
The step-by-step instructions on how to dehaze in Lightroom are not complicated; yet, you will need to experiment with this process extensively to get an idea of the extent of this feature.
Step 1: Import or open your photo in Lightroom (to learn more about how to import RAW files into Lightroom, we cover the steps here).
Step 2: Open “Develop” mode.
Step 3: Locate the dehaze slider in the basic panel, between Clarity and Vibrance.
Step 4: Slide the slider to the right (or back to the left) until the haziness of your photo has disappeared.
Bonus: Create Haze in a Photo
While many photographers spend countless hours trying to dehaze their photos, you may want to use the dehaze tool to create haze in your images.
The dehaze tool is ideal for creating crisp, clear subjects; yet, it is also perfect for creating a dreamy haze that adds a bit of romance to wedding photos.
To add haze to your photos, simply follow the step-by-step instructions below. Yet instead of sliding the dehaze slider to the right, simply slide it to the left to create an opposite effect.
While the step-by-step process of editing photos in Lightroom is not difficult on its own, dehazing each photo individually can be a tedious process. That is why learning the best ways to utilize Lightroom and how to dehaze in lightroom can help you create a streamlined workflow.
For additional ways to speed up your workflow with Lightroom, access our Top 5 Advanced Lightroom Tips blog. This will help you create a fast and efficient post-wedding workflow.