On a recent getaway to San Francisco I realized that I had left my polarizing filter behind after heading out to hoof around the city for a day. I was kicking myself for being so thoughtless as the early morning sky cleared to become a beautiful shade of bright blue (this might have been the calm before the storm that blew in to the coast a couple weeks ago). One of the images from that morning is below:

It’s not exactly what I remembered seeing that morning. Well, it is… but it isn’t. The highlights are too bright and there's an overall lack of contrast in the image.

However, not all was lost — after dumping the shots from my memory card on to my Macbook, I attempted to recreate a polarizer’s effects in Lightroom:

• decrease the exposure (+0.6) to bring the brights down a little bit,
• increase the fill light (+34) to bring some light back into the shadows from the overpass,
• increase the vibrance (+40) to add saturate the colour spectrum,
• and increase the blue saturation (+36) to add some more blue to the crystal-clear sky,

The amount of these adjustments are going to vary depending on the subject of your photo and the conditions under which it was taken, but—generally speaking—these steps recreate some of the effects a polarizing filter has on your camera’s optics after the shot is taken, rather than before. Take a peek at the result:

(For the record, I also tweaked the tonal curve just a smidgen, removed some spots, and cranked the clarity to add some definition to the tonal edges. You can see a larger copy here.)

Much better! Unfortunately not all of a polarizer’s effects can be replicated in post-processing (in particular, glare and reflections can’t be easily removed or minimized), but this is as good as you can get without adding a few more pieces of glass in front of your lens.

Lesson learned.