For a long time, I treated the Dehaze slider like that one guitar pedal you keep on your board but never actually turn on. Too risky, too unpredictable, too easy to ruin a shot that was almost there. Clarity I’d use occasionally, usually too aggressively, and texture felt like the polite, younger sibling of a tool I didn’t fully understand either. I knew something was off about how I was using them, but I couldn’t articulate why my results kept looking crunchy, strange, or just weirdly brown.
That’s why this Nigel Danson tutorial landed so well for me. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube – it’s one of those rare walkthroughs where someone takes the time to explain what a tool is actually doing under the hood, not just where to find the slider. Nigel’s framework for understanding these three tools changed how I reach for them, and it’s made my edits cleaner and more intentional across the board.
The core problem these tools share is that they’re easy to misapply because they all seem to do something similar on the surface: add punch, add detail, add drama. But they’re targeting completely different frequency ranges in your image. Once you understand that, everything clicks.
Step 1: Recognize What Dehaze Is Actually Doing to Your Image
Overcast Wales landscape with Dehaze slider being increased
Start with an overcast image, something with atmosphere and a sky. Push the Dehaze slider up to, say, +50, and watch what happens. In a lot of landscape shots, you’ll see the sky shift toward a strange brownish, almost muddy tone while the foreground barely changes at all. This isn’t a bug – it’s the tool behaving exactly as designed, and understanding why it happens is step one.
Dehaze works by looking for areas of the image where haze or atmospheric scatter is present. Skies, especially pale overcast ones, read as “hazy” to the algorithm even when they’re not actually foggy. The foreground rocks or grass don’t trigger the same response because the contrast and tonal information there is already well-defined. So Dehaze digs into the sky aggressively while leaving the rest of the image mostly untouched. The moment you understand that, you stop reaching for it as a general “make it moodier” slider.
Step 2: Learn Where Clarity Targets Its Contrast
Close-up of soft-toned image with Clarity pushed high, showing tonal degradation
Clarity is a local contrast tool, but it’s not a universal one. It specifically targets the midtones of your image. Think of it as a contrast boost that operates in the middle of the tonal range – not in the deep shadows, not in the bright highlights, but in that meaty middle section where most of the visual information in a landscape tends to live.
Push Clarity too hard on a smooth, gradient-heavy image, like a soft dawn sky or a field of rolling fog, and you’ll start losing what makes the image beautiful. The smooth tonal graduation breaks apart. The colors start to separate in an artificial way. Zoom in and it looks like someone cranked the microwave a minute too long. Nigel’s advice here is simple: if the image gets its impact from smooth tonal transitions, Clarity is working against you, not for you.
Step 3: Understand Texture as a High-Frequency Tool
Abstract Photoshop color chart used to demonstrate frequency of contrast change
Texture is the most surgical of the three tools. It targets areas of high-frequency contrast change, meaning places where tonal values shift rapidly over short distances. Think individual grass blades, the fine detail in tree bark, eyelashes in a portrait, or the cracked surface of dry mud. It’s not interested in broad sweeps of tone – it wants the tiny, rapid shifts.
In Nigel’s demonstration using a flat-colored test image, you can actually see this in action. Pushing the Texture slider on broad fields of flat color produces almost no visible change. There’s nothing high-frequency for the tool to grab onto. But bring it to an image of a rocky shoreline or a forest floor, and it starts pulling out detail that feels genuinely natural, not over-processed.
Step 4: Match the Tool to the Type of Image
Soft dreamy landscape where negative Clarity adds smoothness
This is where the workflow actually lives. The decision isn’t “should I use Dehaze?” The decision is “what is this specific image made of?” A photo with fine surface detail and sharp micro-contrast is a Texture candidate. A photo with broad tonal regions and atmosphere is where Dehaze might make sense, applied carefully and often in combination with masking. A photo that needs a punch in the midtones, without destroying its smooth gradients, is where moderate Clarity earns its keep.
Nigel shows this with an iceberg shot where Dehaze is used deliberately to pull background detail out of atmospheric haze. That’s the right use case – actual atmospheric haze in the scene, not just a sky that the algorithm has decided looks washed out. The transformation is dramatic and it looks clean because the tool is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Step 5: Use Negative Values as Creatively as Positive Ones
Dreamy soft image showing negative Clarity applied for smooth, painterly look
Most people only ever drag these sliders to the right. Pulling Clarity into negative values is one of the most underused moves in landscape editing. It reduces local contrast in the midtones, which creates a softness that can feel almost painterly. For mist-covered scenes, for portraits where you want skin to feel smooth and glowing, or for any image where you’re chasing a dreamy rather than a dramatic mood, negative Clarity does work that no other single slider can replicate.
The same logic applies to Texture. Pulling it back can help portraits look less clinical, softening fine skin texture without blurring the overall image the way reducing Sharpness would. These tools have two directions. Use both of them.
My Caveat: Mask Before You Commit
One thing I’d add from my own editing practice is this: before committing to any of these tools at the global level, ask yourself if a mask would make it better. The Dehaze tool in particular becomes dramatically more useful when you apply it through a sky mask or a radial gradient. That way you’re not fighting the algorithm’s tendency to mangle colors in regions it incorrectly identifies as hazy – you’re telling it exactly where to work.
In Lightroom’s current masking panel, this takes about thirty seconds. Select sky, apply Dehaze to taste, done. The result is targeted, natural, and doesn’t require you to fight the tool’s quirks. This is the combination that took Dehaze off my “never touch it” list permanently.
The single biggest takeaway here is that these three tools are not interchangeable variations on “add drama.” They each target a completely different part of your image’s frequency structure, and using the wrong one for your image type is why the results look off. Match the tool to the image, keep an eye on what it’s actually affecting, and don’t be afraid of the negative side of the slider.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see Nigel walk through these concepts on real images – his visual demonstrations make the frequency explanation click in a way that’s hard to convey in words alone.
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