Improving washed out images - The case of the foggy hippo.

Hippopotamus photographed at drive through zoo in Guatamala

You can imagine my frustration when faced with the perils of shooting with a long lens inside a bus with tinted windows.  Add to that the fact that my literally cool lens was just brought out into a damp, warm environment causing elements to fog up.  On top of all that, now imagine the bus is moving along a pothole-strewn dirt road.  And getting out of the bus wasn't recommended.  The lions have been known to cause problems.

The only solution was to shoot with a high ISO, a fast shutter speed, and hope the reflection, dirt, and other impairments didn't render my images useless.  Such was my predicament yesterday when shooting at the drive-through zoo in Guatemala.

Pressing "play" on my camera allowed me to witness the resulting carnage.  Foggy, low-contrast, highly noisy images were the result.  The good news was that the fogged lens situation was gradually improving while the rest of the issues remained constant.

Some of my images were shot at the ungainly (pun intended) ISO of 25,600, while I managed a relatively respectable ISO of 3200 for the above photo.  The sun had come out, and there was little shade in the current area.  The heavily tinted bus windows were still playing havoc with the light.

Back on the boat, where my laptop eagerly awaited my memory card, I began processing the raw images.  You can see the result on the left - an unprocessed file.  The right is the one I ended up with after manipulation in Photoshop.  Not excellent, but pretty good.  

The trick was a combination of dehaze, noise reduction, sharpening, and playing around with the exposure and saturation sliders.

I am happy with it, given its original state.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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