Add atmospheric haze

In real scenes, distant things look paler, lighter and a little tinted by the air between you and them. Atmosphere adds that. It estimates how far away each part of the photo is, then veils the far parts more than the near ones. It is off until you switch it on.

Add haze

1. Open Atmosphere in the right column. The AI tag on its title means an on-device model does part of the work.
2. Click the power button in the section header. The first time, DarkRay works out the photo’s depth in the background, which can take around ten seconds on a large photo. The haze appears when it is done.
3. Adjust the controls.

Control	Range	Default	What it does
Amount	0 to 1	0.50	The strongest veil, at the farthest part of the photo
Distance	0 to 0.99	0.50	How much of the foreground stays clear before haze begins
Falloff	0.1 to 4	1.80	High values keep the haze near the horizon; low values bring it forward
Auto color	switch	on	Takes the haze color from the photo
Red, Green, Blue (Tint)	0 to 2	0.78, 0.82, 0.90	The haze color when Auto color is off

The depth map is stored with the photo’s caches, so later sessions and exports don’t compute it again.

Set the haze color

With Auto color on, the color comes from the brightest light in the distant part of the photo, usually sky or distant haze. Moving a tint slider turns Auto color off and uses your color. Turn Auto color back on to let the photo decide again.

Note

Atmosphere needs a depth model you add in File › Preferences… › AI Models (Bring your own model). Until there is one, the section says Needs a depth model. with a link to that page, and its controls are off.

Haze part of a photo

Atmosphere works on the layer selected in the Layers pane. See Layers. A Depth Range mask uses the same depth map, so adding one costs no extra wait.

Technical details: the scattering model

Atmosphere blends the photo toward a single “airlight” color, weighted by distance: result = photo × (1 − w) + airlight × w. This one blend reproduces what real haze does: lost contrast, lifted shadows, less saturation and a tint, all growing with distance. It runs in linear light before the display transform.

The weight is Amount times the distance past the clear foreground, raised to the Falloff power. The depth map is relative, from nearest to farthest, and its edges are refined once when it is made so haze doesn’t leak across silhouettes. The automatic color averages the brightest 2% of the farthest part of the photo, measured on a small copy.