Question

Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
July 10, 2025
362 replies
26320 views

This post applies to Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic.

Dust Removal is no longer in Early Access status and can be found in the Remove edit panel for Camera Raw & Lightroom Classic. Dust Removal helps remove distracting spots in an image that may be caused by dust on a camera's sensor and is also effective on dust on the rear lens element.

Once enabled, your image will be scanned, and any detected dust spots will be automatically removed using Content-Aware Remove. For refinement, you can select one or multiple spots to delete or refresh. Batch removal is also supported; simply select the "Dust" checkbox under "Remove" in the copy settings dialog.

Please note that scanned negatives are not in the scope of this feature at this time.

Dust spots on scans tend to be located in the focal plane, with the negative and very sharp, while sensor dust is typically positioned out of the focal plane and therefore not in focus.
Scanned negative dust typically appears as white spots on a darker background, whereas perceived sensor dust tends to appear as dark spots in lighter areas.

We would love to hear your feedback on Dust Removal! Please give it a try and let us know what you think:

How is it useful?
How could it be more useful?
What could we do to improve your experience?

Lisa Ngo, Product Manager

Also see this video by @brianmatiash where he demos the feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwpUX4b6igY

Posted by:

A

Allison259072756xuh

Participant

OMG this is fantastic! I often have a lot of bright skies in my photos, so this is a tremendous time saver!

Thank you 😁

masonreed

Participating Frequently

Looks like a very useful feature, especially for batch cleanup. It should save a lot of time dealing with sensor dust, and hopefully scanned negatives can be supported in a future update.

D

DWalden

Participant

Totally useless. Cannot see even blatantly obvious dust specks on a solid color object.

N

NicolaGhiselliPhotography

Participant

the tool does not recognized the dust in my case

R

Richardnoonoo

Participant

Dust removal worked with one click and did a fantastic job.

A

AJ3706763565dr

Participant

This tool doesnt work lol, never has

L

liann4887

Known Participant

this does *not* work for studio product photography. it only removed marks found on the white background/cyc wall. the product is dusty for sure, and it didn’t find one piece of dust on the actual product. i really wanted this to work!!!

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Author

Please read the top post in this thread.
It explains exactly what this feature is designed to do.

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

C

christinef58502318

Known Participant

As I have suggested before, change the name of the feature!!

bfitch

Participant

Ran into the same thing with my own film scans, and it's by design unfortunately. The tool is trained on sensor dust — small dark spots on a lighter background. On an inverted colour negative the dust comes out bright instead, there's far more of it, and half of it is fibres rather than round spots. The detector just doesn't see any of that, which matches what Rikk said about scanned negatives being out of scope.

Two things that help a bit inside Adobe's tools: run Dust Removal before you invert, if your workflow allows it — at that stage dust is still dark-on-light so the model has a chance. And for fibres, the Remove tool with a small brush does less damage than the automated pass, which starts eating grain if you push it.

Full disclosure, I build a small desktop tool called DustMagic for exactly this gap — batch dust removal on colour film scans (negatives, slides, Kodachrome). It only changes the pixels it flags as dust and shows a mask of what it changed so you can check it. It won't do silver B&W like HP5 or Tri-X, so Bob's case is one it can't solve. Trial is free and unrestricted (output is watermarked) if anyone wants to test it on their own scans first. Leaving the link out per forum rules — easy to find by name.