Question

Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
July 10, 2025
225 replies
23860 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:

Show previous replies

B

Bruce Richardson

Participant

The feature failed to identify any dust on a high resolution scan of the black and white photo. Surprising, because it's quite obvious to the naked eye.

Erik Bloodaxe

Legend

Doesn't work on scans. See the top post in this thread.

B

Bruce Richardson

Participant

That makes it wholly useless then. I came here directly from the app, so I didn't read anything--just reported my results. Honestly, what are they thinking? That people let their sensors get so filthy they need to automate dust removal on a digital camera?

R

RenatoNPhoto

Known Participant

I just tried the dust removal tool, but it didn’t detect dust in areas with midtones and details. I understand that if dust is not obvious, neither ACR nor a human observer may notice it. I believe a dust removal tool could benefit from a “pilot image” where dust is clearly visible, which could then serve as a pattern or map to correct other images. A plain white background with dust spots might reveal many spots that aren’t noticeable in actual photos and may not need removal. However, in real photos, some dust spots may be mistaken for image details, so using a pattern from a pilot image could provide more reliable guidance for ACR.

Erik Bloodaxe

Legend

This exactly what Canon does in its own proprietory software.

Manniac

Known Participant

I was so curious how this would work - but sadly removing *sensor* dust is not useful for me. I have thousands of negative scans with billions of dust particles waiting to be removed. I hope you'll soon consider us analog people too.

(Also, please add a true negative mode for lightroom. Negative Lab Pro gets you only so far.)

B

Bob_H2o

Participant

Would love it if this could be modified to identify and remove backscatter for underwater photography.

B

Bart030359

Participant

Here the same remark!

J

JLobert

Known Participant

This is mind blowingly effective and amazing! Kudos for that feature. It detects dust spots that are only visible to the eye when the "visualize spots" feature is cranked up, so this is implemented really well. I also love that it will re-calculate this for each photo when pasted as a sync, because dust spots move as the camera is used.

Is there an estimate when this will be available to LIghtroom? I would hate to miss out on it there. Thanks!

T

Toastman3000

Known Participant

Sadly this feature ignores film scan dust

P

phudelot

Participant

Outil fantastique. Quand c'est sur Lightroom, c'est Urgent.

M

Marco Basile Images

Participating Frequently

Fantastic tool. Maybe change the spot circles to a brighter white or red for better visibility?

D

Drugstore

Known Participant

Tried it but didn't find any of these obvious dust spots. Also no message that nothing could be found.

Erik Bloodaxe

Legend

This function works only on sensor dust spots (at the moment). Are you sure this is what you have here?

Tone357

Participant

It doesn't work at all for me. When I hit reply, the box that shows it working appears for less than a second and is gone. I also get a message that says., No dust was found, when the photo is full of dust!

C

CR Photo

Participating Frequently

I confirmed the feature works well with the kind of dirt you see on digital camera sensors. The kind of dirt you are talking about on scanned negatives and positives is very dfiferent. Unfortunately this new feature will not work for us film photographers. They will need to train their AI model on film scans or make an entirely different model. I'm not sure Adobe will ever spend the money to do that, but I certainly hope they do.

johnm271253

Participating Frequently

This tool was working absolutely fine before, for some years, on the same
material.

I have looked at these comments when posting my problem.

Thanks

John

John M.

F

frankb76907269

Participating Frequently

This new feature is a great idea. However, in nighttime photos, it only detects some of the spots and sometimes uses poor repair. But the feature has great potential!
Such a feature would also be great for hot pixels and white stuck pixels caused by camera sensors.

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