Tag Archives: #dehaze

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Cursed by Lens Fog

I anticipated that Amtrak’s Crayola-Blue ACS-64 621 would lead the first or second eastward Keystone from Harrisburg.

With this in mind, I arrived at Jefferson Drive in the morning to intercept the first train. For me this was a good news/bad news scenario.

The good news: although I’d cut it a bit fine, I arrived ahead of the train.

Bad news, the ambient humidity was extremely high, so as soon as I stepped out of the car my camera lens fogged. No amount of cleaning would keep it clear.

Good news: the Crayola Blue locomotive wasn’t leading.

Bad news: my photo of the first train was fogged.

Good news: Kris suggested I use the ‘Dehaze’ effects slider in Lightroom to correct for the fog, and to my surprise this trick worked very well.

Better news: I had another chance at catching Amtrak’s Crayola Blue locomotive on the move. So I drove east with the heat on in the car and the windows open. My hope was that, while uncomfortable, this might bring my camera up to temperature so that it would be less likely to fog when I got out of the car.

This is scaled, but otherwise unmodified RAW file as it came out of the camera. Although it was a bright clear morning, high humidity fogged the front element of my lens, which had the side effect of resulting in underexposure as well as reducing clarity and contrast.
Kris suggested that I try Lightroom’s ‘Dehaze’ slider. This effect compensated for the undesirable effects of lens fog. Afterwards I lowered the saturation slider and lightened the image using exposure controls. It’s not perfect, but much better than the flat, soft and underexposed image that I had out of the camera.

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