Removing Dust Spots with ACR and Lightroom

A pesky problem for photographers is dust spots, also known as the “dust bunnies”.

- Ashok Kandimalla

These appear due to dust or other minute foreign objects on the sensors. The problem is more acute in mirrorless cameras, as there is no mirror preventing dust ingress. To make it worse, the shutter remains open on some cameras when you power off and change lenses. The solution is to clean the sensor yourself (not recommended) or occasionally visit the service centre and have your sensor cleaned. This is not an ideal solution either, as it involves time and effort. The other option is to remove the dust in post-processing, but removing spots one by one using the Removal tool in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) or Lightroom Classic (just Lightroom hereafter for brevity) is tedious and time-consuming.

Luckily for us, Adobe has introduced a wonderful new tool called Dust, which is a part of the Removal tool group. The amazing feature of this tool is that it automatically detects and removes dust spots in seconds without any user intervention. This is still in a developmental stage (hence, the label Early Access), but we found that it works remarkably well. It is also very simple to use. The only hitch is that it is buried deep inside ACR. Let us look at it in more detail.

Let us start with an image that is full of dust bunnies (Picture 1). To use the Dust tool, first go to the Remove tool group in the ACR (Picture 2, red arrow) and select Distraction Removal (green arrow), and then the Dust tool (yellow arrow). Next, click on the check box Apply. The rest is fully automatic! ACR will identify and remove all the dust spots without any user intervention, thus greatly reducing the processing time you need to spend. The result is shown in Picture 3.