How to Dehaze Video in Premiere Pro
Hey everyone, welcome to FilterGrade. Today we’re going to show you how to dehaze video footage. Haze occurs when the darker tones in your video are more grey than black. This usually doesn’t look very good, and you need to dehaze this footage. There are several ways to do this, and we’re going to cover multiple here in this video. Funny enough, Premiere Elements has a dehaze effect built-in, and of course so does Lightroom. But Premiere Pro makes it harder. Probably because we’re pros and can figure it out ourselves. :)
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I’m starting with this footage I took years ago on a Panasonic digital camera. Pictures and videos with it always had a lot of haze that needed editing, and this video is no different.
The first method is to import your sequence into Lightroom and apply dehaze to all of them then re-import all of those images as a sequence, but that’s potentially messy and there are much easier ways.
Adjusting Contrast
The easiest way to dehaze footage quickly is simply by adjusting the contrast. If you’re experiencing grey-ish blacks, you can bump up the contrast. You can also turn down the blacks or the shadows depending on the exact look that you prefer. Each option will do something different, but adjusting the contrast will generally have the best look.
Unsharp Mask
The Unsharp Mask effect will also work for some dehazing. Apply the effect to your footage and adjust the radius until you notice the image getting more contrasted and more sharp, then reduce the amount until it looks more natural and blended. Done right, this will create additional contrast even once your contrast under Lumetri Color is maxed out, if that still isn’t dark enough for you.
The Layers Method
This method uses layers and multiple effects to dehaze footage. Start by duplicating your footage. Apply the Black & White effect to the top clip, then apply the Invert effect to that. Set the clip opacity to the Subtract blend mode. Adjust the opacity of this layer until your footage is dehazed to your liking.
Cineon Converter
Cineon Converter is a filter that converts your footage. You don’t need to understand how the converter works, but some users online have created a handy guide for using this filter in order to dehaze footage. And it looks fantastic. Apply the filter to your footage, then change the conversion type to Log To Log. Set the 10 Bit Black Point to 25 and change the Gamma to 5. Leave the other values the same. This should dehaze your footage as well as balance out your whites and blacks pretty nicely.
These were several methods of dehazing. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this effect, and all of these can be supplemented with additional color grading to get the exact look that you want. Say goodbye to hazy footage, and let us know if you have your own way of dehazing footage. Make sure to like this video if it helped you, and subscribe for more video editing tutorials like this one.
