Remove UGLY Dust Spots: A 2-Minute Photoshop Trick (VIDEO)
Earlier this week we featured an important maintenance guide with a safe-and-effective method for cleaning a dirty camera sensor and keeping it pristine as long as possible. But what about the dusty photos you shot in the past or those you digitize with a scanner?
Today’s Photoshop primer from the Better Pics YouTube channel demonstrates a quick post-processing solution for cleaning up all your digital files. This simple trick is easy enough for users of all skill levels and only takes two minutes to explain.
Instructor Damian is an Australia-based pro who travels and works on all seven continents—sometimes in harsh conditions that may easily affect gear and compromise the quality of results. What follows is Damien’s time-proven editing solution, and it should also be yours.
The demonstration image is a seaside shot with a big, beautiful dark-blue sky—exactly the type of scene in which dust spots tend to rear their ugly heads. These distractions are immediately evident as soon as you zoom in on the top portion of the photo.
Damian illustrates a simple trick for making the spots even more visible: “What I do is add a temporarily extreme Curves adjustment to increase contrast which makes those spots far more obvious.” Now that you’ve found the unwanted junk it’s easy to remove them by using Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush tool that you can access with the keyboard shortcut “J.”
The trick works like this: “If you click and paint over the spot Photoshop samples surrounding pixels and then seamlessly cleans up that spot for you.” There are a few details and settings to keep in mind, but this foolproof method is virtually automatic. So dig into your library and rehabilitate those dusty images that you didn’t know how to fix in the past.
The Better Pics YouTube channel is a great source of information for anyone who owns a camera and wants to edit their images for maximum impact.
And don’t forget to watch the tutorial mentioned above so you can tackle the task of cleaning your camera’s sensor with confidence and keep it that way as long as possible.
