Do you ever struggle with dust spots on your camera sensor? Who doesn’t? If you shoot in the field a lot, or frequently change lenses, dust spots can become a major problem to deal with.
The good news is we can use Lightroom to rapidly rid ourselves of problem dust spots. I came across this method recently, and have found it to be very useful in rapidly spotting and removing dust spots from our images when we are developing them in Lightroom.
Starting with your image, develop it as normal to get the best range of exposure and tones. Dust spots are often most visible in plain areas such as a blue sky, but they can be tricky to find unless you enlarge to 100% and scan through all areas of the image. Here is an example that looks to be dust free at normal viewing size:
The basis of the approach is to exaggerate the tonal differences between areas that normally are very smooth – like the smooth changes that are occurring in the sky. The first step is to open the Tone Curve area in the develop panel and click on the small button on the bottom right corner called “Click to edit Point Curve.” With this button pressed you can select points on the curve and move them around.
The first curve to draw is one that starts at 0,0, then click and drag up to 100% height at 12% width, then 0% height at 25% width and so on. It sounds complex, but you are basically drawing a sine wave curve with four peaks. Once you have drawn it, click on the name box (it will say Custom) and save it as “DustCatcher1.”
Now repeat the process, but this time start at 100% height at 0% width – a sine curve again, but starting from the upper left corner rather than bottom left. Save this one as DustCatcher2.
When you have finished your editing of a photo, your next step should be to open the Tone Curve box and select “DustCatcher1” as the Point Curve. The picture will now look like this:
You can see at least one dust spot in the orange area in the top left of the image. You can correct dust spots using the “dust spot” tool while the image is looking like this as the tool works as normal to find an area of similar tones to heal the spot.
Then switch to the other point curve – DustCatcher2. The reason we have two, is that some areas will go very dark with these curves and a spot in that area would be invisible. The other curve makes all dark areas light and vice versa and so we get to see dust in all areas of the image:
In this image we see the same spot at the edge of the blue area.
Finally, you can set the Point Curve back to its normal setting (which is linear if you are editing a JPEG, or Medium Contrast if it is a Raw file.)
I think you will see that this method will help you spot, and remove, dust much more quickly than normal. Good luck, and keep shooting!
About the Author
Steven Heap has been a photographer for many years, but started in the stock industry just 5 years ago. Steve’s focus is mainly on travel and nature imagery, although he is fascinated by the opportunities from still life, studio and product photography. Steve has also written a book on how to get started in stock photography, available from his blog BackyardSilver.com
