I just saw this, but there’s been plenty of discussion around the new “features” that Adobe has added in Lightroom CC 2015.1 or whatever they’re calling the CC release that corresponded with Lightroom 6.1. Adobe has made some weasily comments about how they’d be in violation of various laws—which they almost certainly wouldn’t—if they added these new “features” to Lightroom 6.1 and blah blah blah. I don’t really want to get into it, instead I want to talk about working around the stupidity that this imparts.

Overall there is one big laugh in this whole matter. Lightroom CC 2015.1, Lightroom 6.1, and the equivalent Adobe Camera RAW (9.1in CS6, I’m not sure what the version is for CC), all use the same code base and rendering engine, all support the same adjustments. If you stop and think about it this make sense for two reasons. First, it allows Adobe to cut costs and maintain one code base. More importantly, it means that there aren’t all kinds of stupid compatibility breaking issues when moving from version to version. That is, you can dehaze an image in LR CC or ACR for PS CC, and send it to someone as a DNG, and they’ll be able to open it in Lightroom 6.1 and see the image rendered properly.

This was of course rapidly discovered by people looking to see what the software supported, and very quickly there was discussions online at DPReview and other sites about this. Of course, it didn’t take long for someone to make the leap and try building develop presets in Lightroom CC for dehaze then copying them to a Lightroom 6.1 installation to see if they worked.

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what the results were. Yep, the dehaze presets work just fine in Lightroom.

Since this revelation, several people have jumped out on this revelation offering free dehaze presets for download. The first ones I came across were from a company called ProLost.

I have to make a bit of an aside here on this. ProLost, I’ve nothing against you except for this. You want me to register to download a free zip file containing some text files. I understand it was probably easiest for you to stick them in the same e-commerce platform you use for your other stuff, and I don’t fault you for selling stuff at all, but in this day and age where sites are being hacked left, right, and center, creating an account and providing any information just to get something for free is not what I consider a good idea. Sorry guys, I’m not downloading your dehaze presets, I’ll generate my own.

With that said, if you’ve ever done anything with Lightroom develop presets, you’d know that they’re just text files. And text files are easy enough to generate on their own. So I built my own set of Dehaze presets, which I’m making available here for free—and no you don’t need to register an account or give me any info to download them.

Download and Installation

In the zip file, there are 3 folders, Dehaze 1, Dehaze 5, and Dehaze 10. These correspond with presets that step through the complete dehaze range (–100 to 100) in increments of 1, 5, and 10 step increments. If you don’t want the smaller increments, don’t copy that folder into your Develop preset folder.

To install them, unzip the downloaded zip file and drop one or all of the “Dehaze #” folders into either of the following folders (replace _your_user_name_here_ with your actual username).

Behind the Scenes

For those that are interested, I’ve generated these with a simple python script and modified template file.

The template file is shown below:

It’s just a Lightroom template with placeholder strings inserted for the things I needed to change for each increment.

For those that are interested, the lrtemplate format is basically a string encoded variable. I’m not sure what the language is exactly, but it’s most likely lua since that’s used extensively in Lightroom. The outer structure where id, internalName, title, type, version and value are is mostly bookkeeping stuff.

Title corresponds to what is displayed in the preset list in the develop module. Internal name and id appear to be something internal in Lightroom for bookkeeping purposes, though I’m not sure they matter that much or if they’re even really used. The same goes for the GUID that’s in the value section.

The meat of making the preset work is the settings part of the value section. Dehaze is the value that’s applied if you had a slider. The other two variables (processVersion and EnableEffects) appear to be necessary to get dehaze to be applied.

For completeness I’ve included the python code that translated the template into a whole lot of individual dehaze presets below. I’m not going to go into detail on it, suffice to say if you want to play around with generating templates with python (Python 3 specifically), you can do something similar to what I’ve shown below.