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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
July 10, 2025
Question

Distraction Removal: Dust (Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic)

  • July 10, 2025
  • 197 replies
  • 20615 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 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:

197 replies

Ruona Photographer
Participant
March 16, 2026

Yes you have to manually remove every little speck but the program often replaces one speck of dust with another over and over again.

Ruona Photographer
Participant
March 16, 2026

the program replaces one speck of dust with another

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.