Today’s Question: I saw a reference to automatic dust removal in Camera Raw, but I don’t see that in Lightroom Classic. Is it available, and if so do you recommend using it?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, the automatic dust removal feature is available in Lightroom Classic and can be found by going to the Remove tool and going to the Dust heading after expanding the “Distraction Removal” heading. I do recommend enabling this feature if there are visible dust spots in a photo.
More Detail: While the Distraction Removal features were added to Camera Raw before they were available in Lightroom Classic, those features have since been added to Lightroom Classic as of version 15.
To get to the dust removal feature, first select the Remove tool from the small toolbar below the histogram on the right panel in the Develop module. Next, expand the Distraction Removal section if it isn’t already, by clicking on the heading on the right panel. You can expand the Dust controls by clicking on the heading within the Distraction Removal section. There you can turn on the Apply checkbox to enable the automatic dust removal.
If you want to first get a sense of where the dust spots are found in the image, you can turn on the Visualize Spots checkbox and drag the associated slider through the full range to vary the contrast. This will enable you to see dust spots that are visible to varying degrees based on the slider movement.
My experience has been that this automatic dust removal feature has been very helpful at removing spots caused by dust and other debris on the image sensor in the camera. Note that it won’t automatically find other things you might consider to be blemishes, such as power lines running through the image or a small bird that creates a distraction within the frame.
