Hit dust for six
Stumped by black spots on your digital images? Adobe’s latest software will make them cleaner than your cricket whites. We show you how...
Even the most recent crop of digital cameras, with their high-tech dust removal systems, have yet to crack the problem of sensor dust. Field reports suggest that only dust-technology pioneer Olympus has even come close to reducing the problem to any significant extent. So for the meantime, those of us who regularly change lenses (and even a few that don’t) have no choice but to continue our periodic sensor cleans with cleaning products like Visible Dust’s Arctic Butterfly.
It’s not all bad news in the development stakes though. Two new software innovations at least offer an improvement by way of post-capture solutions. Until recently, the discovery of dust after a day’s shooting could mean another full day holed up in the digital darkroom spotting images one by one, or assembling complex Photoshop actions that automate the task. However, the latest incarnation of Photoshop and its Camera Raw plug-in and Adobe’s newly-released workflow application Lightroom afford a more straightforward approach to batch dust removal.
Adobe Camera Raw 4 has a Retouch Tool built in, while Lightroom performs the same task with its Remove Spots Tool. They’re based largely on the same interface with only subtle differences in operation. The crux of both is the selection of dust on one image using their respective tools, and the synchronisation of this removal across multiple images, in much the same way as you might apply a global white-balance or exposure setting. And as with other sync-friendly settings, you can fine-tune this removal for individual images where the global change hasn’t quite worked, changing source points where necessary and even switching between Clone and Heal modes. The following tutorial demonstrates the batch spotting techniques in both applications. Once applied, all processed images in a batch will be dust free.
BEFORE
AFTER
Adobe Lightroom technique
Batch dust removal works in Adobe Lightroom too, and the process is very similar. Again, simply choose an initial image to work on, then synchronise the retouching steps across a selection of images.
Unlike Photoshop where the initial image is chosen in Bridge, in Lightroom it’s selected in the Develop module. The Remove Spots Tool (shortcut key N) sorts out the dust and it works just like Camera Raw’s Retouch Tool, with the source and destination circles, Heal and Clone modes. The bracket keys (or Spot Size Slider) adjust the brush size, while altering the circles is done exactly as it is in Camera Raw.
When you’re happy the dust has all been removed, apply the clean up to all the images by clicking Sync, Check None and then finally Spot Removal.
