(Early Access) Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw)

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Announcing Early Access to a new feature in Adobe Camera Raw (17.5) – Dust Removal

This post applies to Camera Raw.

The team is sharing an early look at Dust Removal, which can be found in the Remove edit panel for Camera Raw. Dust Removal helps with removing distracting spots on an image that may be caused by dust on a camera's sensor.

Once enabled, your image will be scanned, and the detected dust spots will automatically be removed using Content-Aware Remove. For refinement, you can select one or multiple spots to delete or refresh. Batch removal is supported as well, just 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 in the focal plane with the negative and very sharp, while sensor dust is typically out of the focal plane and not in focus.
  
• Scanned negative dust tends to show as white spots on a darker background, while perceived sensor dust tends to show 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:

[Richard_Shapiro5326]

I tried it on an image with about a hundred tiny dust spots, and it failed pretty badly.  I'm sure it will work on easier images.  

[Gionibek K]

Viens de tester sur Camera Raw, outils Gomme-Poussière, pour l'instant je ne suis pas très convaincu par le resultat.

Il y a enlevé quelques tâches sur la plaque en metal noir, mais les poussière bien visible en blanc n'a pas résussit à detecter .

[MacC]

Used Dust removal on a jpg from an iPhone. It did not work. and it was exposed correctly.

[CarlosFilipeOperti]

It's incredible, hands down, but miss faint spots.

[Nexus 6]

Fantastic. I garb some wine bottles I photographed weeks ago and did some clean on spots and now WOOOW guys keep on This fantastic. I will use this feature a lot, and I bet you will come with more refinements to this option
Thank you guys. By the way I try it on a powerful  PC and on a laptop Acer Aspire 3 15, 16 GB ram and  Ryzen 7 5700 U with radeon and it was very fast . On the laptop I was expecting that will take longer to do the removal but no.
I like it

[randallkincaid]

never really had an issue with sensor dust...its usually one or two spots easily removed (my experience retouching)

find a way to "one click" this and i'm all in. 

[steve_8334]

Just tried it on an old digitized slide. It removed some of my dust spots, but not all.

[MrWinnieThePooh]

Impressed - it works fine me and, in practice, I find it one of the most useful recent enhancements. 

[Miguel Claro]

Thank you for creating this helpful tool. This is something I've been waiting for so long. It's not yet perfect, as it seems to loose some dust dots, but for sure it's a working progress. I was thinking that if perhaps the tool could analyse more than one photo, like a short sequence of images, as it works on timelapses, it might help to distinguish and understand where are located the dust dots as these are the only ones that should stand still on the sequence.

[Pedro Cortez Marques]

Great to see this and test it out.

If it removes 80% of the spots, it's ready to be public, even if it can get even better later on, because I tested on some images where it removed one unrelated to sensor dust dot that should have been kept.

[jennylens]

USELESS for Scanned Photos. Yes, I know ALL your focus is on Digital images and AI. But there are many photographers and archivists dealing with prints, negs and slides. Which are dusty, scratched and pitted. YET of VITAL Historical Importance. 

Too much to ask that you remember us?? Cos the photos I took provide so much joy and content to many books, docs, mags, merch and more, and of course online. But my photos can never be replicated cos they were of a special time and place.

Oh well, never mind, back to endless hours of fixing my photos that labs mucked up cos Adobe doesn't care about film photographers and archivists.

[Erik Bloodaxe]

You seem to be criticising this new tool because it was not designed to perform a different function which you would like to see implemented. It was designed to tackle the problem of sensor dust spots and nothing more. Perhaps what you want may come in the future.

[jennylens]

Yes I seem to be asking for something ONLY because Adobe always manages to never upgrade tools for film photographers and archivists.

Gee, how else can we respond to tools but to say hey, what about another group of photographers who have been supporting, teaching and evangelizing for Adobe Photoshop since version one, circa 1990?

Jenny
-----------
Jenny Lens, MFA, most published early punk rock photographer, west coast, first gen, 1976-80 when music ROCKED. Also teacher, writer, artist.

PunkPioneers.com - store and rebuilding membership site

[Design-Kink]

Especially when the tool isn't called Lens/Sensor Dust removal, it's just called Dust removal. 

[jvik]

Doesn't seem to do anything. After "Apply" I get either "No dust spots found", which is fine, or "Click on a removed area ..." but there are no removed areas indicated.

[defaultyvc34qwauhzh]

Funktioniert sehr gut! 

[Hannah336829518xwv]

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 🤞

[mpvervier@comcast.net]

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.

[TONY VAN GALEN]

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...

[SPfoto]

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.

[Edward1549]

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.

[Edward1549]

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. 

[Bart5CFA]

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

[Erik Bloodaxe]

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

[jd999uk]

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.