Sentimental picture - how do i remove the fog

Question

My camera lens had condensation on it from going from the air conditioning to outdoors when I took the pictures. The pictures came out foggy. Is there a way to edit them?  Here is an example. Any editing advice?

Answer 1

Hello Allison,
just one more thought on how to remove fog:
Fog is an additive degradation of the image. It blocks the path of the light from from your subject to the camera, and emits white light towards the camera and so your camera captures the light reflected by the scene + the light emitted by the fog.
This diminishes the contrast, and most important, dims the colors by blending them with white- the colors appear to be washed out and less saturated.
A filter to reduze the haze usually does two things:
estimate the amount of additive white by locating the darkest spot in the image and assuming this should be black.
subtract this amount from all pixels.
Professional remote sensing software (like ENVI) usually has this kind of filter, called "white subtraction", not be be confused with "white point correction". I could not find such a filter or plugin in Aperture. If you know of a plugin that allows you to subtract a fixed intensity value from all pixel, that would be exactly what you need. Graphic Converter used to be able to subtract images, but I can't find it any more in the new version, maybe Gimp has such a filter.
Neither contrast enhancement nor white point correction do that kind of correction.
As a work around:
increase the definition and (a little) the "contrast", like suggested in the pevious posts.
increase the "saturation" or "vibrancy"
don't use the white point correction - that will only remove the last traces of color in the additive white and make the problem worse.
adjust the "exposure".
If you detect a "white subtraction"-plugin for Aperture, please let me know. Above is a version of your sentimental picture with a little increase of "definition" and "saturation"
Good luck
Léonie