How Smoky Days Affect Photos

We have had some smokey days recently in our province. If you have tried to take some vacation or family photos, you noticed that the smoke caused so many problems, the photos were not sharp and bright. Did you delete those photos? Hang on there! In this article I am going to show you how to edit smoky days photos in Lightroom and create decent pictures.

Here is a photo that I took Before the smoke attacked our region.

The contrast and colour in this picture is perfect. It is very bright and inviting.

Below you see the photo that I took during the smoky days. I did my best to be almost in the same spot and set the exposure right. But as you can see everything looks terrible in this photo!

Here comes the main question. Is it possible to fix these problems? Keep reading, as I will show you how Lightroom can save pictures taken on smoky days.

Lightroom is a powerful editing software. It is designed to help photographers fixing common issues of a picture. Lightroom also has some powerful tools, such Dehaze and Split Tone tool. Our Lightroom classes covers most of the advanced tools as well as the basic adjustments. Check our upcoming Lightroom class and register quickly as the previous Lightroom class sold out fast.

Using Lightroom to save the image

To start with, I adjusted the Dehaze slider and then started to adjust the Basics such as Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. I also added a little of Clarity to increase the Mid tone contrast. Here is the photo

Here is the screenshot of the Lightroom and you can see all the adjustments.

Lightroom Colour Curve Adjustment

Lightroom Curve Adjustment is one of the advanced tools in Lightroom. I use it a lot to create artistic images. In the above photo, I could stop right there as the picture was good enough. But I wanted to make it perfect! I used Curve adjustment, then I selected the Blue Chanel and increase the highlight point to blue and decrease the shadow point to yellow. Here is a screenshot of the adjustments.

Here is the final picture. There is no sign of the smoke in this photo.

Join us for our Lightroom Class on November 7th. It is a 3 session program for beginners that walks you through Lightroom more popular editing tools.