Often haziness is part of the atmosphere of a certain place and time of day but sometimes you want to remove it from your landscape photos. This is the method I use.

This is our slightly hazy starting image by Forrest L Norvell…

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First, duplicate the layer (Ctrl+J) and set the blending mode of the top layer to Multiply….

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remove-haze-3This darkens the whole photo and the foreground is too dark now but the mountains at the back are looking better. To only apply the adjustment to the mountains and not the foreground, I added a layer mask to the top layer with a black to white gradient fill (the one on the right). This shows the original image in the foreground but our improved mountains. This masking step is a lot more tricky if the distinction between foreground and background can’t be made with a straight line but fortunately it can be in a lot of landscape photos.
We now have the following image…

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The top half of the photo now looks a little dark so to fix this and bump up the mountains a bit more I then added a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and applied the same layer mask to it (you can copy a layer mask to a different layer by holding Alt and dragging and dropping it between layers in the Layers palette). I pushed up the Brightness (to 33) and turned up the Contrast (to 46) to give me the following final image with significantly less hazy mountains but maintaining a good balance between the foreground and background…

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