Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

Honestly, I don't understand the difference in viewing dust and spots on a totally white image versus on a black screen. Why does LrC dust removal turn a totally white page to totally black when the visualize slider is moved to the right and are all those white spots really dust spots? I don't believe it! When I view the same page normally with visualize disabled I can actually see the dark spots or dust if you will and there is in no way near that many! So when using visualize with slider all the way to right, illustrated in my previous post, are all the white areas just noise? As you know, sensors show noise in the absence of light.

Adobe needs to explain more and without a lot of techno bable how the feature works.

Add the ability to remove white dust from a dark background

I need instruction how to use the “visualize spots” function. Even with a newly cleaned sensor (cleaned by Precision Camera as part of my Sony Pro Imaging membership) when I move the slider all the way to right I see lots of white spots. However, with slider at 50% I don’t see anything. How is the “visualize spots” function used? Please see imbedded screenshots.

​@Rikk Flohr_Photography ,

Thanks for information. I am aware of the auto sensor cleaning function in the cameras. However, in my experience, I find the function doesn’t work most of the time and that typically an actual physical cleaning of the sensor is needed. I am very, very careful when I switch lenses, which isn’t often because I have multiple cameras with the same specifications to eliminate having to change lenses.

That said, as careful as I am when I do change lenses I find that occasionally spots get on the lens. I don’t know how that can possibly happen but it does. So, I utilize my Sony Pro Imaging Support membership to take advantage of the 3 free cleaning and checks per year. In the old days, pre-mirrorless, I would clean the sensors myself.

I do have a pertinent question about the LrC dust removal process. Do you know if image contest judges consider Ai dust removal to be acceptable?

I’m finding that for underwater photography the dust removal is failing about 30% of the time, and in every case it’s because it’s decided to be about half as big as it needs to be. Seems like something that could be corrected pretty easily, is there any way to turn up ‘default auto size’ or similar?

I am working on an image with lots of distractions/dust in the reflection and was hoping the dust removal tool would identify and remove those, but that didn’t work. Am I missing something that could help with that?

I don’t understand how to use the visualization feature of the distraction dust removal function. Are are the white circles that show up actually dust spots from the sensor? I took shots of the sky with Sony A7CR and A7R_5 and used those to practice using the feature. The images taken by 7CR with the Sony 400-800mm at 400mm 1/40s @ f/36 ISO 100, showed a bunch of circles.

Unfortunately, this site won’t let me upload a raw file and I don’t know if the jpeg would show the same results. If you want the jpeg or shared raw let me know.

Regards,

GEGJr

Please add scanned negative dust removal soon, we need it! Looks like that’s what most people are expecting here with the name of this feature. It’s frustrating to see a dust removal tool and have it not detect any dust when trying to edit scanned negatives. A drop down menu option to specify which kind of dust would be awesome! And to address workarounds, it would be nice to stay within Lightroom without having to edit in Photoshop. The dust & scratches feature in Photoshop looks bad but on the other hand Photoshop’s spot healing is so much better and faster than Lightroom so the whole experience feels like it could be smoothed out by adding scanned negative dust removal in Lightroom. please please please! (:

great tool, so much easier

My experience so far is that dust removal for negative scans is not nearly as useful as it could and should be.

Thoughts / ideas

1. Create a slider that would visualize just what it would consider a dust spot before hitting apply.
2. Allow for that slider to be adjusted later and the re apply