Using Lightroom's Dehaze on Informal Portraits

We were at a family gathering last weekend and I told Doris that I wasn't going to bring a camera.  It was time for family, not for photography.  At the last moment I said I'd toss the camera in the car "just in case",  The just in case wasn't so much if anyone asked me (or anyone cared) to get some shots as much as it was if the mood struck me.  It wacked me up along side my head and I clicked the shutter more than five hundred times.  The kid (he's 31 or 32) in today's image is a nephew.  He's about 6'2", a body builder (more excellent shape rather than muscle bound), shy and better looking than he knows.  As you can see, if anybody's looking for a male model, he'd be a good candidate.  To find out "what's going on" in today's image, hit the "Read More".

It's just a grab shot.  We were sitting around in the gazebo by the pool talking.  Him, his brother, sister in law, his folks and the two of us.  You can see that the image has an eight by ten crop, but other than that it's the maximum frame (no crop top to bottom).  I was about eight feet away sitting on another chair,  The lens (a Nikon 18 - 300) was racked out to about 270mm using a DX crop function in the camera.  So, with some soft math the 35mm equivalent would be about a 525mm lens.  He didn't pose and didn't know I was shooting him.  It's just the natural structure of a young man listening to a conversation.

Adobe's Lightroom (LR) CC 2015 has a new feature that I believe they've put in basically for landscape photographers.  The Dehaze slider (found in the Effects Panel) can remove or reduce the distant haze typically found in large scale landscape images.  I used it in a post (two down if you're on the blog site) where I pushed the slider in the opposite direction of removing haze.  I added haze to a flower image giving it a soft focus (but still sharp) look.  I'm sure Adobe knows once they release something the public will find interesting uses for new tools and features.

In the case of today's image I played with the Dehaze Tool and went in the direction of removing haze.  Actually I moved the slider both right and left just to see what it would do.  There was no real haze in the image so going to the right tended to bring out the texture of his skin.  I liked what I saw so I immediately grabbed a shot of a female and found that pushing the Dehaze slider to the left softened the skin without damaging the skin texture.  Sort of a neat trick. 

Males can take a rougher, scruffier look while females  typically look better with a softer treatment.  I'm pretty sure Adobe didn't bring out the Dehaze Tool as a portrait enhancement tool, but I think it works fairly well.  You might want to give it a try.