How to use the Dehaze tool in RawTherapee

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The Haze Removal tool removes atmospheric haze and increases the contrast and saturation. However, often creates over-saturation and an blue cast. In this video we are using two pictures and we correct the colors using the color correction tools. The details about the algorithm are available here: http://kaiminghe.com/cvpr09/ The pictures used in the video are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GRnQR3A-dcWUYVmBHWB2ICpzQUDXnmJ_

How to "pop" your landscape picture using RawTherapee




I 'm sure that you have seen the beautiful landscape images that look like painting or part of a dream. In this post we will try to explain how to make such photos using the RawTherapee. The photo is taken in Rhodes Greece and presents a picture of an old medieval building in the countryside. The day was partially cloudy and the light soft. However, the sky is much more bright than the ground.

First of all, before start editing the picture, we reset the exposure by pressing the reset the curve to linear in the tone curve. We press the “Auto Levels” button to improve the overall exposure. However, now we notice that the bottom is much darker than the sky. To fix this, we increase the exposure to improve the lightness of the picture.


Now we have the opposite effect: the upper part of the photo is much brighter than the bottom, creating clipping areas in the sky. To fix this we will use the graduated filter. We can increase the Feather, if we want to make the filter less noticeable.


Next, we switch the Tone curve 1 from Control Cage to Parametric.  We increase the Lights and the Darks, but we also decrease the shadows. We can also use the highlight compression to reduce clipping.

We also enable the "Tone Mapping" and the "Vignette Filter". We decrease slightly the strength of the "Tone Mapping", and we increase the strength of "Vignette Filter" to 1.



In the detail tab, we enable the contrast by detail levels and we slightly increase the sharpness.
In the Color tab, we increase the color temperature and we enable the soft light filter, with default strength. The soft light filter enhances contrast and saturation. This is done by emulating the effect of blending an image, with a copy of itself.



In the transform tab, we go to the Lens/Geometry tool, and then to the Distortion Correction section. Our photo is now ready. We can press Ctrl+S to process it now or press Ctrl+B to process it later.



You can download the example files from here.

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