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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

artw61974141
Participant
February 11, 2026

This does not seem to work at all, even on the most obvious dust spots (white specks on black surface).  What gives?

 

Inspiring
March 16, 2026

Maybe Adobe should clarify if this feature is just for sensor dust or dust in general.

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
March 16, 2026

The Original Post contains this information. 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
imix4u
Participating Frequently
February 11, 2026

Why is Adobe not responding to any of these threads, saying that this tool doesn’t work?

Participant
March 2, 2026

they are waiting to collate all our photos and eventualy the tool will get better I guess. it needs to make mistakes and gather a greater spectrum in order to improve. they just need to analyse everyones dusty photos so they can make a tool that works maybe. 

remokoller
Participant
February 11, 2026

I have tried using the tool several times now, but unfortunately it doesn't work at all. I have to do everything manually every time or resort to using another application (Topaz). 

Participant
February 10, 2026

Honestly had so much faith in this, considering how well the “remove” AI tool works...nope. The dust feature so far has done absolutely nothing on every single photo I’ve tried it on. Most of them with blatantly obvious dust, in very easy to detect places.

 

TERRIBLE tool. I’m sure you guy’s will fix it though, considering everyone else says the same thing.

Participant
February 10, 2026

 

jonathanp96416794
February 10, 2026

I’m a 4x5 photographer. Today I learned you have an “AI” dust removal tool, thought it might save me an hour of click-click-click-click….. nope, still had to click on every piece of dust. Not a very intelligent tool...

imix4u
Participating Frequently
February 10, 2026

Well, that’s completely useless. I thought it was supposed to be able to find stuff our eyes couldn’t see, but you’d think it would get the obvious stuff our eyes DO see!  “No dust spots found.”

 

Participating Frequently
February 8, 2026

Did not remove ANY spots. tried several times w/all 3 tools.

Participant
February 7, 2026

It removes about a 1/5 of obvious dust spots in my ICM photographs. There’s another 2/5 of obvious dust spots it misses. The rest I get when I zoom in.

Inspiring
February 4, 2026

The dust feature is great! BUT why nest it within Remove?

If you want to remove dust you have to open Remove, then click on the tiny triangle to open Distraction Removal, then another tiny triangle to finally get to Dust.

After doing the dust removal…

When you then want to retouch something you have to close the Distraction Removal panel again.

If you do this time and time again it gets really annoying!

Why not give Distraction removal its own panel?

Why not create key strokes for them all?

Here’s hoping someone there is listening.

john_jb74
Participant
February 3, 2026

I have tried this on 15 scanned positives (35mm slides) where this feature would be really useful. It is successfully removing about 50-60% of the dust, but not the rest.  I would like to see:

  1. A “sensitivity” slider to try to pick up the missing spots, perhaps optimising by eye against image damage (e.g. removing small stones that are not dust).
  2. The visualise spots seems completely unusable. 
  3. Touching up for additional spots is a slow process and visually difficult due to the already circled dust being in white which only works on dark  images - which is not where the trouble usually is. 

Thanks - this was be fantastic to get right as I go through digitising 5000 positives.