Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s Spot Removal Tool makes image repair easy once you learn a few tricks. I covered the Dust Spot Removal Basics using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom in the previous tutorial.
Click here to download the examples in this video and play along! (Subscribers Only)
In this lesson I have two advanced tips to add to your Lightroom skills:
- How to Remove Larger Objects with Advanced Healing.
- How To Really Search Your Entire Image For Problems Using Keyboard Shortcuts.
We were able to hide dust spots in our photos in the first four versions of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but removing larger objects required a trip over to Adobe Photoshop for more powerful tools. Until now, we have only been able to work with small round brushes when retouching images in Photoshop Lightroom. While a soft circular brush is great for covering over a dust spot or a pimple, it is not the ideal tool when you need to remove something larger like a distracting logo or lens flare.
Starting with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom version 5 we now have the power to create other brush shapes by clicking and dragging over the flaws in our images. The ability to create other shaped brushes is called “Advanced Healing.” When we remove an object from a photograph the flaw must be covered over with something else. The trouble though, when removing larger objects, is that the human eye is very good at detecting repetition and pattern.
Removing something larger than a dust spot is challenging work because we need to make sure that we are not creating a pattern that is clearly recognizable as some other part of the image. When the human eye detects repetition, things look phony. Often, the best way to remove a larger object from an image is to use multiple overlapping Advanced Healing Brush strokes at a reduced Brush Opacity to create a seamless blend that shows little signs of repetition. Photoshop CC’s extensive collection of image repair tools are always a better choice for complex retouching projects but there is a lot that we can do without leaving Adobe Photoshop Lightroom thanks to the new Advanced Healing capabilities.
I demonstrate the most efficient way to search your entire image for dust and flaws in the second part of this video. The secret here is to use the Page Up and Page Down keys on the keyboard while zoomed in to 100% to move through the image in a linear pattern without ever putting away the Spot Removal Tool. This keyboard trick makes searching for dust spot far more precise especially when paired with the Shift + Tab keyboard shortcut to hide away all of the panels.
