Removing blue haze in airborne pics

[Damn Brit]

Originally Posted by newarts

Physics is SO COOL! I removed the haze from each channel of your photo, increased that channel's contrast to bring the highlights back to where they should be, then re-merged the channels. Here's the result:

You've also created a lot of noise in the process by the looks of it.

[graphicgr8s]

Here is another version with a little different technique.
Again not a lot of time spent. For some reason I have been unable to get rid of the haze in the sky area. Strange since I've never had trouble with areas like this before. But it's only about 5 minutes on this version.

[troyz]

Originally Posted by peterh337

Thank you everyone! This is fantastic. I need to learn a lot more about Photoshop...

I occasionally have to do the same thing to fix color casts on scanned negative film. The problem is similar, although not as severe as the haze you're dealing with.

The "Auto Levels" function in Photoshop finds the left edge of the histogram for each channel, similar to what Dave suggests:

Layers / New Adjustment Layer / Levels
Click on "Auto Levels"

Auto Levels also finds the right edge, which may mess up the white balance.

While the Levels window is open, check the histograms for the Red, Green, and Blue channels; adjust the white sliders beneath the histograms (typically to the right) if necessary.

BTW, retro style points to Dave for using ImageJ!