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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
  • 23662 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

Daniel Motta Photography
Participant
March 16, 2026

This does not work on bit. 

PBR-DK
Participant
March 16, 2026

I think I found out why it does not work - the program doesn’t remove the dust by itself. You have to manually remove every little speck. The only thing the program does, is to activate the dust removal, so you can remove the dust specks with one click on each speck.

I must confess, that I thought that the program would scan the photo for dust and try to remove them automatically using AI - I don’t see why that should not be possible.

But I can see from some of the previous posts, that apparently the dust removal program does not support negative scans, which defeats the purpose of a dust removal program, to be honest !! 

 

Ruona Photographer
Participant
March 16, 2026

Useless! 

PBR-DK
Participant
March 15, 2026

Just tried the dust removal tool in Lightroom Classic on a bw negative after converting in NLP - I se NO effect what so ever !! Useless !!

Inspiring
March 14, 2026

Just tried it and worked horribly.  It got a few, but many, many huge spots remain.  Attached is a screenshot.  I did try it in both Lr and LrC.  Not good either place.

Inspiring
March 14, 2026

This can be deleted.

L_Hopegood0127
Participant
March 13, 2026

I do not understand why you press on dust for dust removal and then have a separate button to execute it.  Why not just one button?  There must be a reason I assume but it is annoying!

Participant
March 11, 2026

Noisy iPhone shot at night of city scape in China.

Ollie_
Participant
March 5, 2026

The scope needs to be broader to support film and flatbed scans.

To improve the experience start with:

  • Improve dust removal for B/W and color film
  • Improve scratch removal tools film.

This will show that Adobe isn’t ignoring film based photographers and in fact wanting to offer more value with the product.

 

This example is a scan of a film that was poorly washed. (Rewashing addressed a huge amount of contaminants) however surely software could do something.

 

AshlynRancudo
Participant
March 13, 2026

AGREE! Been waiting for this / needing this for years.

Participant
March 2, 2026

I absolutely love the dust removal. I used to dred cleaning up dust spots. It used to take hours of tedious selection and hopefully the replacement would match. Now. No problem. Quick and easy. Adobe. You got this one right. Thank you.