Dust removal & Advanced Brush Healing Tool in Lightroom5

Its been a long time since I first mentioned DSLR's dirty little secret, dust on the sensors. Back then (late 2006) I was also looking at the beta that was to become Lightroom and I was severely flamed in the user forum for asking about a brush adjustment. to fix dust spots among other things. The volume of negative comments didn't bother me because at the time I had already "discovered" how to fix the dust spots with a cloning tool. Well I lot has transpired since then and perhaps a little behind its counterparts Lightroom does now have good dust spot removal, shown here. Spot being the important word (it does circular clone or heal), so trying to fix a linear tear or hairline might involve a lot of fiddly cloning. In reality I still prefer to do any dust and other tidying up in Corel Photo Paint. Now I find myself trying out the Lightroom 5 beta and the first thing that grabbed my attention is its Advanced Brush Healing Tool, which could well be the very tool I asked about 8 years ago. The "hardedge" surreal visualize spots view is particularly useful, like my photograph the blue sky trick, at helping you find the dust spots. I think a fair bit of drudgery might have just disappeared. This time I dare not ask the obvious question about synchroninzing these fixes across a series of photos (because the dust spots will be in exactly the same place). Phew someone has already asked that, thanks Juergen. Providing you just use the auto selected “source” for the clone or blend (blend is better) you can go ahead and synch the dust spot removal, with other photos, its just that occasionally you will want to shift the auto selected source location in some, hopefully only a few, of the synched copies. By the way you can do this in Lghtroom version 4 as well.

Adobe’s video on YouTube does a nice job of explaining the advanced brush healing features, make sure to pay attention to short cuts and tricks towards the end.

Lightroom 5 Beta is available for download now. Remember, as advised in the video, it is a beta version, so don't work on your existing catalogue, and don't use your original photos!