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Dust removal is a very easy thing to do in Photoshop. Using the healing brush tool, you can remove dust in literally two clicks. However, two clicks time two hundred photos really builds up and can overwhelm you. When you are taking a number of landscape photos, for instance, it is a frustrating process to keep track of every piece of dust in the sky. Thankfully, patterns or dark areas generally don’t require dust removal. This tutorial shows you how to remove dust from up to 200 photos at a time in Adobe Camera RAW.

First, I’ll show you how to remove dust from a single photo in ACR. Load your image and select the “Retouch Tool”, hotkey “B”. Using this tool is very easy - click and drag to determine the size of the dust speck, then position the circle that determines the area of the image ACR will use to patch the photo. For this first step, it is best to use an image at a small f/ stop. For this image, I used an equivalent aperture of f/95 on an old Nikon telephoto lens. However, with most modern lenses, use f/22 or so. Also, make sure the reference picture is somewhat plain - a photo of a white sheet of paper, a photo of the sky, etc. Patterns, detail and shadows mask the dust, so you may not find all the dust in an image when using a regular photo.

Locate the specks of dust you’d like to remove. Shown here are two large specks of dust, boxed in red. The Retouch Tool is at the top, also boxed in red. Click the center of the dust speck, and drag so the retouch tool completely covers it.

Make sure the “Type” of Retouch tool you are using is set to “Heal”. Click and hold the mouse button over the speck of dust. Drag to the side of the speck, so that the red circle completely covers the dust speck. Let go, and ACR will automatically calculate the area it will patch the image from, shown with a green circle. You can manually set the area by dragging the red or green circles.

To cover another area / dust speck, just repeat the step. The other areas you used the Retouch tool on will now turn blue. If you want to go back and edit them, just click the blue circle.

Removing dust from an image is just that simple. However, to remove dust from multiple images, there is an extra step. With two or more images loaded, perform the same dust removal on one of the images. Then, with the raw file you removed the dust on still selected, press “Select All” at the top left of the Camera Raw dialog box.

Making sure your retouched image is still selected, press “Synchronize”. From the drop down menu, select “Spot Removal”, or make sure “Spot Removal” is the only button checked.

That’s it! You might want to check each image to make sure that the spot removal was performed successfully in each image. However, now that you know that every piece of dust is selected, it makes removing them from the individual images much easier.

This post is tagged adobe camera raw, dust, dust removal, raw