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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
July 10, 2025
Question

Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

  • July 10, 2025
  • 225 replies
  • 23693 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:

225 replies

Known Participant
August 30, 2025

I love the idea of automatic dust & scratch removal, but it didn't work on a car fender -- dark colored car, lots of easily visible dust. It only saw a very few of them

Inspiring
August 31, 2025

@marjgreen It's sensor dust removal!

Participant
August 29, 2025

ottimo

Participant
August 28, 2025

Quitar el polvo de por ejemplo una superficie de acrilico no es posible, dice que no hay motas de polvo a pesar de que con las tintas planas se ven las motas de polvo. 

capteurdimagedanielthomas
Participant
August 27, 2025

Just WOW !!!

Participant
August 27, 2025

For some reason, I'm getting a 'Something went wrong' dialogue box, stating it cannot download the Dust removal models.

I've tried downloading manually (via the AI Model Downloads on the More Image Settings) and it never gets past 75% and then fails.

Participant
August 27, 2025

Géniale la suppression de poussières !!! Je suis enchantée !

Participant
August 27, 2025

Hey, so I work with BW film (a lot) - it aint dececting the dust at all 

Erik Bloodaxe
Legend
August 27, 2025

This tool was not designed to do that job. Please refer to the original, topmost post.

Participating Frequently
August 27, 2025

The Beta  does NOT find any dust spots on scanned black and white negatives saved as 16 bit TIFF file, which of course siad egatives have many dust spots. It would be nice if could work even a little bit with scanned negatives. Thanks in advance in this happens.

Participating Frequently
August 27, 2025

sorry for the typo shoudld be "said negatives". I read the explanation at the top but it would still be a positive feature to have in the future. I mostly use LRC, but always take the scanned negative to PS first via External Editor to clean them up before working on LRC Develop module. 

 

SPfoto
Known Participant
August 26, 2025

At first thanks Adobe for this new tool. Really automatic dust remove is a thing that should be, we was waiting for this for a long time! Hope soon Adobe add similar tool for video editing, where dust removing is even more complicated.

 

Second. Please, make similar tool for removing laser damaged pixels on camera sensor. I like to shoot in club style with lasers. And two of my cameras have laser damage. Looks like hot red pixels. There is no softwhere that can automatically remove this from image. This is even strange cause it's not so complicated cause damaged pixels are always on the same position. So I can train ACR on one specially made image and then it should automatically do the same work on all other images. So please pay attention to this problem too.

If Adobe needs example images of photos taken by laser damaged sensor, I can send it.

TONY VAN GALEN
Participant
August 26, 2025

I always try to keep my sensor and gear clean but I do have an archive of B&W negatives that really need some intelligent way of dust removal. Color negatives and slides use the dust removal from my Nikon Coolscan 5000ED but this doesn't work with b&w...

Participant
August 25, 2025

Doesn't work for scans of c prints (darkroom prints); would be amazing to see a dust removal feature that works for film negatives and print scans 🤞

Participant
August 25, 2025

I tried using the early release AI dust removal and it didn't work on my photos.  They are Sony ARW raw files.  See the attached samples.