Review: Neutralhazer, a haze removal PS plugin

I came across the site of Kolor.com, a company from where I grew up near the Alps. Those guys  build professional softwares for image processing, including all kinds of real fancy stuff (Autopano to generate panoramic images out of a random pile of photos of a same scene, 360 shooting...).

They are launching a product called Neutralhazer, which is essentially a haze removal photoshop plugin. Full license costs 46 Euros or roughly $60.

Haze is this: "A slight obscuration of the lower atmosphere, typically caused by fine suspended particles."

If desired, it's a great thing to play with (like in the following example), but what if you want to get rid of it?

courtesy of : http://www.flickr.com/photos/edwinylee/4153525166/

I tried the free trial version, here is my feedback.

I first picked a picture that actually would look better without haze from that guy on Flickr:

I applied the following setting in Photoshop Element 9 on Mac OS Lion.

And here is the result. Keep in mind there is a watermark since it's a trial version:

That works pretty well to me, in particular those kind of pictures are very common and often people come back from vacation disappointed by haze having "ruined the pictures", landscapes not looking as they did when on site.

For the record, I tried it on the first picture and I got tons of weird color effect in the sky, probably because the haze was either too strong, or because it was showing city lights emphasized? It only shows that post processing has it limits but that's quite normal. In the normal use case scenario, it seems to be doing a pretty good job.