If you’re like me one of the most frustrating things that can happen when at a zoo or similar type of facility is to get a faint ‘cage haze’ on parts of our images. This is often caused when we can’t get quite close enough to the mesh on the cage to be able to shoot past it and it forms some ghosting on our photograph.

I had this happen to me a few times when shooting some raptor images at the Mountsberg Conservation Area in Campbellville Ontario. There are ropes in front of all of the captive raptor displays that make it very difficult to get close enough to shoot past the wire mesh.

It occurred to me while capturing these images that it may be possible to use the DxO ClearView function in OpticsPro 10 to help correct the ghosting effect caused by the wire mesh. So, I thought I’d give it a try.

Obviously not all such images can be enhanced by using this feature as you my have more severe and localized ghosting than in my sample image, but if you’re a DxO OpticsPro 10 user you may find it helpful to salvage at least a few of them. Let’s have a look at an out-of-camera jpeg that has some noticeable mesh ‘ghosting’ effect on it.

Note: click on images to enlarge

You can see quite clearly that the upper right side of this raptor’s face is much clearer and sharper than the centre and on the left hand side which has some ghosting from the wire mesh of the enclosure.

Now let’s have a look at the RAW file processed through DxO OpticsPro 10. Standard auto adjustments were used. In addition, I was somewhat aggressive with the DxO ClearView function, setting it to 60. I took highlights to -20, used my typical Lens Softness settings of 1.21 and 70, and then applied PRIME noise reduction. All in all, about 10 seconds of slider movements.

The image above shows the results of this initial processing in DxO OpticsPro 10. For many users of this program this initial set of adjustments may be sufficient for their needs.

Just for fun I took it a bit further and exported a DNG file into CS6, then made some additional adjustments. After a couple of small tweaks in Nik Suite here’s the finished image.

While it is not perfect by any means, it is an improvement from the original. And, the most important thing is that it wasn’t that hard to do. Again, this isn’t an award winner by any stretch of the imagination…but I think the image has gone from what many of us may throw away to something that could be useable for a lot of folks.

The point of this article was simply to point out to users of DxO OpticsPro 10 that the DxO ClearView function can be used for this purpose. I would imagine that similar results can be achieved with other software programs.

My intent is to keep this photography blog advertising free. If you enjoyed this article and/or my website and would like to make a modest $10 donation through PayPal to support my work it would be most appreciated. You can use the Donate button below. Larger donations can be made to tom@tomstirr.com through PayPal.

Article and all images Copyright Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, duplication or adaptation of any kind is permitted without written permission.