Images captured beneath water are usually degraded due to the effects of absorption and scattering. Underwater imaging is very important in present technology for detecting object like fishes, algae, minor particles etc. Light scattering and color change are two dominant sources of distortion for underwater imaging that lowers the visibility and contrast of the images captured, affects ambient underwater environments dominated by a bluish tone. Hence, the presented system demonstrates a novel approach to enhance underwater images by distance factor estimation along with a dehazing algorithm. The noise particles are removed before dehazing by implementing distance factor based on intensities of different color channels with gamma correction improving the brightness of dimmed images. The dark channel prior removes haze and noise effect, providing better visual quality with adaptive exposure map estimation for adjusting too dark and too bright regions of underwater image. At the final stage, the motion blur and water transparency effect is removed using high frequency emphasizing filtering. The enhanced haze-free and natural appealing output can be used for display and analysis purpose.