[Tex/LaTex] Removing erroneous whitespace after figure caption

captionsfloats

I'm writing a document with two columns, and after compiling I noticed I have a hideous amount of whitespace after one of my figure captions:

Screenshot of erroneous whitespace

The LaTeX code used for this part of the document is as follows:

\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6.5cm]{./LaTeX/Images/GeometricalFrustration}
\caption{\small{a) .....}}
\label{Triangle}
\end{figure}

I've tried getting rid of the whitespace by using a negative argument for he \vspace{} command but that just merges the main text into the figure caption. If I use a smaller value to try and avoid this (like -1.1cm, for example) the document compiles the same as below where I don't use the vspace command. Are there any other ways to remove this whitespace?

Best Answer

Ok, fiddled about with it and I've used a couple of fixes. For those who are interested, the preamble is included below (not entirely my choice. I've been provided with a template that I have to use).

The problem was that on the page following this there was a title for the following section. LaTeX was spacing things out so the title didn't begin at the bottom of the page. I used two fixes for this: the first being to reduce the amount of whitespace between the caption and the text using \setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-12pt}. The second (and probably more important) fix was to tell LaTeX to stop being pedantic about where it put section titles with \usepackage[small,compact]{titlesec}. The title now appears at the bottom of that page (with some text beneath it), which I'm fine with for the purposes of this document.

Thank you all for your help and suggestions. 

\documentclass[a4paper,twocolumn,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[top=25mm,bottom=25mm,left=25mm,right=25mm]{geometry}

\usepackage{amsmath} 
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{xfrac} 
\usepackage{float} 
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[version=3]{mhchem} 
\setstretch{1.44}
\setlength{\columnsep}{6mm}

%not included in the preamble for the example in the original problem
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-12pt}
\usepackage[small,compact]{titlesec}

% Following change makes the caption size footnotesize From:        http://rorasa.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/instant-latex-command-for-small-figure-and-table-caption/  

\makeatletter
\long\def\@makecaption#1#2{
  \vskip\abovecaptionskip
  \sbox\@tempboxa{{\captionfonts #1: #2}}%
  \ifdim \wd\@tempboxa >\hsize
    {\captionfonts #1: #2\par}
  \else
    \hbox to\hsize{\hfil\box\@tempboxa\hfil}%
  \fi
  \vskip\belowcaptionskip}
\makeatother
\newcommand{\captionfonts}{\footnotesize}

\begin{document}
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