I did some looking further into what exactly Adobe was withholding from Lightroom 6.1 Standalone vs Lightroom CC. The basic capability to De-Haze is apparently in both versions. The user interface in Lightroom 6.1 simply doesn’t have the De-Haze defined slider, which the upgraded Lightroom CC now has.
The same effect can be realized in Lightroom 6.1 using presets – Prolost has a free set of presets specific to the De-Haze functionality. This is awesome, and I found the set so intriguing I went ahead and paid for the entire Graduated preset collection to play with.
The very interesting piece of this is that the De-Haze preset works with Lightroom 6.1 – not with Lightroom 6, only with the upgraded 6.1 version – and addresses an internal Dehaze function not available through the UI…
Here’s a partial look inside one of the De-Haze preset template files:
value = { settings = { Dehaze = -14, EnableEffects = true, ProcessVersion = "6.7", }, }, .
Note that this requires the image to be using Process Version 2012. In Lightroom, Develop Module, go to Settings -> Process to verify at 2012 – if not you can go to Settings -> Update to Current Process (2012) to bring the image up to date.
Adobe has suggested they can’t release new features to Lightroom 6.1 Standalone – this pretty much demonstrates that in this case that is not true – this is basic functionality available within Camera RAW and made available potentially in both Lightroom 6.1 Standalone and Lightroom CC – and disabled in the UI in Lightroom 6.1 Standalone. This is cripple-ware, intentionally crippling a program to extort money. Not one of my favorite things
—spence