How to use 'Dehaze' on Lightroom 6.1 Standalone

When Adobe released Lightroom 6 aand the CC version, Lightroom CC 2015, they also very quietly announced that Lightroom 6 Standalone would only be getting bugfixes and camera compatibility updates from here on out, and no new feature updates. Lightroom CC, however, would always be the latest and greatest, which is apparently due to accounting regulations about not releasing new features to products after the first quarter in which it was sold, whereas no such rule exists for subscriptions. It also has the effect of making CC plans look all the more tempting: they’re already a great deal if you want Photoshop, but they’re a rubbish deal if all you want is Lightroom.

Anyway, with Lightroom 6.1 Adobe found themselves with a brand new feature – that only CC subscribers can have: they added ‘Dehaze’, the effect of which is shown above on one of Adobe’s marketing images. Unfortunately, thanks to pesky accounting rules, Lightroom 6.1 can’t have Dehaze. If only they’d finished it just a month or two earlier. What rotten luck, eh? Well as it happens, the 6.1 update actually added everything Lightroom needs behind-the-scenes to do Dehaze just fine, and just removed the slider from the interface. This is so that if you import a current-gen LRCC image with Dehaze into a current-gen LR6.1 catalog, it’ll render just fine even though you can’t then edit the Dehaze effect in 6.1.

The good news!

Because 6.1 already has the tools to render Dehaze, all that’s needed is a way to access it and control it. Now thanks to Stu Maschwitz of Prolost you can download a totally free set of Presets that let you do just that. You drop them into your Develop Presets folder and it gives you access to graduations of the official Dehaze effect either side of zero. Once installed the only difference between 6.1 and CC’s Dehaze is the lack of a slider for intermediate values, but I really don’t think you’ll miss that.

It’s a completely free download, uses the official Dehaze engine, and doesn’t invalidate your copy of LR 6.1, so if you’re on Lightroom 6.1 and fancy some Dehaze action, head over to Prolost (it doesn’t work on LR6 or earlier). While you’re there, you should sign up to his mailing list – looks like he does a nice line in Lightroom tools, and you get 10% off your next purchase after downloading his free Dehaze presets. I get nothing for plugging him – I just think he’s done a great thing making this Preset for free!