OK fair enough. I have gotten some good mileage with the Blacks control. It may be called something different in LR6, but it's the one representing the darkest parts of the image (darker than "Shadows".
You can search this, and other forums, for "dehaze" in the title and find a large number of threads pertaining to this problem. However, here's piece of text I wrote for my camera club in October of 2017, specifically for LR6 users who want dehaze. I do not know if if any of this still works or not and some of the folder locations may have changed. I also apologize for the length but here goes.....
Hi all, (10/3/2017)
You never stop learning. I subscribe to a very nice daily newsletter by Tim Grey (
Ask Tim Grey – Answers for Photographers… ) which contains Lightroom and Photoshop tips in form of user questions with answers by Tim. I find that I agree with Tim over 98% of the time. Mostly, he just validates what I already know but today I learned something new. There is a trick to allow the use of the Dehaze filter in LR6.
As you know, Adobe sells LR either as a standalone (perpetual license) version which is currently LR6.x ($149). They also will rent Lightroom to you along with Photoshop, LR mobile and some cloud storage for $10/month. The rental is called CC2015.x. In each case you get bug fixes and new camera support for free. However, most new features are only supplied to the rental version. If you have LR6 you won’t get them until they release LR7 (which is about a year and a quarter late already – so who know if or when it will ever come out). One of those features is the very useful Dehaze Filter which is only in the rental version.
Well, Tim Grey explained a work around to allow you to use the Dehaze filter even if you have the LR6 version. So, here’s the deal. You can’t get the actual slider in your LR6 version, but you can use develop presets that apply the filter if someone (like me) was kind enough to create them from LR CC2015. I didn’t follow Tim’s method exactly. For one thing I left “process version” out of the preset. I’m not going to go into a long discussion of what a process version is but you can read about it on your own. What this means is that if your image was imported in a pre LR6 version you will need to update it to the latest process version before you apply the presets. The other thing I’m doing different than Tim is that I’m not using the Import/Export method to get these preset to you. I’m saving them on my Google Drive where you can copy them.
Here’s what you need to do:
1) Download the “Dehaze” folder from my Google Drive here:
Dehaze - Google Drive . Unzip the downloaded file to your desktop. This will result in a folder called “Dehaze”
2) Find out where your Lightroom presets are being kept. This is usually in
- PC: C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom
- Mac: Macintosh HD / Users / <your user name> / Library / Application Support / Adobe / Lightroom
- Or, if you are keeping your presets with your catalog (a preferences setting), there will be a “Lightroom Settings” folder in the same folder where your catalog is
To find out exactly where it is,
- Go to the Preferences dialog by selecting Preferences from the Edit (Windows) or Lightroom (Macintosh) menu on the menu bar.
- Go to the Presets tab in the Preferences dialog.
- Click the "Show Lightroom Presets Folder" button to open a window in your operating system that will show the Lightroom folder where presets are stored.
3) Close Lightroom
4) Copy the downloaded Dehaze folder into the folder called “Develop Presets” in the folder you found in step 2
5) Restart Lightroom
In the Develop Module, in the left panel group, in the Presets panel you should see a folder called “Dehaze” and inside it are 11 presets – one each of 11 different Dehaze values. On any image you want, just click the preset for the amount of dehaze you want to add or remove. These are in steps of 20 from -100 to +100
Is this as good as having the actual slider in LR CC/2015? No. When you use it on an image it will produce the same results as the real thing would but there are limitations.
1) You cannot use it in a localized area (i.e., within the Radial tool, the Gradient tool, or the brush tool)
2) You can only apply it at increments of 20 (e.g., +20, +40, etc.) not fine finessed values (BTW if you find you need finer increments let me know & I’ll do it by 10’s rather that 20’s
I no longer have LR6 installed so haven’t been able to actually test these instructions. If you give it a try, let me know who it went.
Thanks -- Dan