Lightroom De-haze Filter on skies
I was just playing with some photos I had taken at Coopers Rock overlook near Morgantown in West Virginia and was pretty unimpressed with what I saw:
Pretty bland colors and the sky is very dull – not blown out but uninteresting.
As usual I applied a graduated filter to the sky and reduced the exposure and brightness a bit, but still pretty bland. I tried a control I haven’t really used on skies before – dehaze – and was amazed at what it did. Almost immediately the differences between the high clouds and the bluish sky became visible and I used the temperature slider to slightly increase the blueness (which also allowed me to warm up the rest of the picture) and with a few more changes to clarity and vibrance, I ended up with this. Not a fantastic picture for your wall but good enough for Shutterstock!
I am a huge fan of dehaze. As you say it brings a lot of interest to skies and to photos in general.
Yes, I had used it for increasing the contrast in distant hills when the air was a bit hazy, but this use in the sky certainly made a difference!
Have to be careful with dehaze since it increases luminance noise by much.