P: Lightroom/Camera Raw: Automatic scratch and dust removal

Removing dust spots from photos is the most delirium inducing task photographers have to do. From a programmer's perspective, the dust spots are quite uniform in size and color, they have a faint distinguishable edge, and there should be no problem writing a function to identify them all on the photo, remove, and then allow the removal to be applied to all the photos in the batch. Job done!

There are many post to this idea but adobe is sleeping - good morning!

See comment in other thread (if you haven't already): http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Rob, if I understand it right, your other idea requires you to first identify all of the dust spots (which I suppose it would be best to do with a reference photo against a white background), remove them with the dust removal tool and then sync the changes to the other photos. I agree with you that would be quite a chore for a number of reasons, not least of which is the one you mentioned.

I wonder whether there are any third party RAW converters that do this automatically.

For the slide scanners, I am aware of only one program that can make use of the infrared info AFTER the scan is complete--VUESCAN from Hamrick Software--all of the others (Digital ICE/ Canon FARE) do it at the time of scanning only forcing you to commit to the level of removal you want.

Good idea, since having a white background in the reference photo allows the code to isolate only the affected pixels.

You may also be interested in this idea to better handle the case with no reference photo:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...