Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

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 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 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:

[jrwilander]

AI Noise reduction + Dust removal does not work well together.

[jrsforums]

@jrwilander the orange/yellow button on upper right (under histogram) needs to be press.  See what you get then.

[jrwilander]

Whoops, thank you looks great now ❤️

[johnm271253]

Exactly, it removes the eye lights as if it is dust.

John M.

[SmoothAsL]

So I've been dreading going through pictures from my last trip, because I had a few ill-advised lens changes. The Lightroom tools were amazing for seamlessly removing the dust spots, but when you're doing that for 100 pictures it gets...rather tedious.

This automatic removal is amazing so far and such a time saver! Even if it only gets 90% there, the last 10% is trivial as opposed to removing 10 spots on every single image. 

[dagnyg]

Nice! A good way to deal with this annoyance 

[ed_nl@ch]

Quite a useful function, in the B&W view I would like to have the spot identification circle in some color (orange, red?), the white circle is sometimes hard to see.

[johnm271253]

Thanks, the took I was asking about used to circle the blemish to be
removed in pink, and the pixels replacing the area were also shown. I agree
that now the doubled circle is far less useful and often does not seem to
work at all.

John M.

[Montpat]

This is a really interesting development for all photos taken with digital cameras since the 2000s, thank you very much... BUT it would be even more fantastic if it worked with scanned slides or films (or re-photographed with a digital camera): I have thousands of slides that I re-photographed with a digital SLR and which are full of dust.

Removing the dust takes hours, so please extend this feature so that it can work (even imperfectly) on scanned photos. For your information, it already works a little bit. 

Best regards, Patrick

[dongz14409238]

great feature, I had always headache while seeing the photos from clear sky because there are very often that dusts were also captured. However, use it carefully. There might be circumstances that this feature also generate ghost effects.

Here are two examples shown before and after: