Does the Dehaze Feature Work on JPEGs in Photoshop?

Photoshop expert Howard Pinsky takes a look at an interesting question following the recent release of Photoshop CC 2015 – does the new dehaze feature in Photoshop’s Camera RAW work on JPEG images and how well.

Just last week Adobe announced a comprehensive update to a number of popular software including Photsohop and Lightroom among others. One of the new features which we introduced on both software was the dehaze feature which either adds or removes haze from your images.

Since this feature exist in Photoshop at least in Camera RAW – the part of Photoshop which traditionally used to deal with RAW files – it was an interesting to see if and how it behaves on JPEGs (for some time now you can open JPEGs on Camera RAW and work with them but you don’t get the same dynamic range as you do when working with RAW).

O.K. so as you can see in the video above, the dehaze feature does work on JPEGs. But how well it does and is it exactly identical to what you can get from the RAW version of the file? Pinsky does not test this on his short video – so we decided to try and look for our selves (keep in mind this isn’t a scientific test and the results might be different depending on your specific image that you will use – as you will see in a second).

We took an image that we shot last year in New York on the top of the Empire State building which does have a little bit of haze in it.

Original (no dehaze)

dehaze-originalJPEG with 45% dehaze (click to magnify)

Dehaze-jpeg-45-percentRAW (converted to JPEG later) with 45% dehaze (click to magnify)

Dehaze-raw-45There isn’t a lot of difference but there is some (not necessary in the amount of haze or even details actually). The problem with this image and with a lot of images that you might want to use dehaze on from our testing is that it tends to make the image darker and turn the skies very (very) deep blue if you push it too far. You can of course correct this to a degree in Photoshop BUT, the whole point of the dehaze function is to make our lives easier and our work quicker.

So, here are our conclusions:

  1. Dehaze work on both JPEGs and RAW images.
  2. There is a visible difference between the results on a JPEG and RAW (how much of a difference will depend on what you  shot).
  3. On some images (like in this case with blue skies) pushing dehaze too far will result in over saturation which will require more processing later on to even the image

You can check out more of Pinsky’s videos here on LensVid as well as many more Photoshop related tutorials on  LensVid’s Photoshop section.

 

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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