P4B Lightroom 3 Spot Removal and Crop Tools

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Art Suwansang discusses the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has grown so much, in terms of its image editing and manipulation capabilities. Many of the tools built into Lightroom, both new and old, are features that were designed with very specific intentions in mind. However, using these tools, with some creativity, we can really push the boundaries of the functions, and find new and inventive ways to apply the tools. In the past few issues I have discussed the localised editing brush and the graduated filter in both its intended uses and creative application. For this issue, I am going to focus our discussion around the spot removal tools and the crop tools.

Spots have been removed in image

Dust Removal
Let’s start out with the spot removal tool that was really designed to remove sensor dust from the digital images. Dust in the camera chamber, and more so on the sensor, is generally static and doesn’t really move around as much once it settles in place. Many of the earlier Digital Single Lens Reflect (DSLR) cameras don’t have sensor dust removal or anti-dust mechanisms built in, and as a result, tiny dust particles could sneak into the camera chamber during lens mount or dismount, and during general clean up. These particles would enter and settle on to the sensor once the camera was fired.
The sensor uses electricity to excite the photoreceptor arrays, which in turn generate a lot of electro-static that acts likes a magnet for dust particles.

Before and after close up image

Understanding that dust generally stays in the same place, the spot removal tool is designed to function similarly to the cloning and healing brush within Adobe Photoshop. The idea here is to apply spot removals to only one image and batch synchronise these spot applications to the rest of the images that were shot with the same body, or any images with the dust spots in the same locations. This spot removal brush has two functional behaviours that you can choose from: clone and heal. These functions, for the most part, produce results similar to the equivalent tools in Photoshop. The clone brush if selected, upon application, will take the luminance, colour, texture and all available details from the source point and apply it to the destination point. However, the functional behaviour of heal is much different compared to the clone. In heal, the brush will take into consideration the colour, texture and details from the source point and use this information to fill in the brush destination point. Once applied, the brush will then compute the base luminance and colour of the destination point, and blend the two sets of information together. The different effects and results between these two brushes can be seen in figure 1.

There are two others parameter controls that you have with the spot healing brush: size and opacity. Both of these sliders are fairly straightforward in functionality. The size slider controls the brush size, while the opacity slider controls the opacity of the applied effect at the destination point. As far as applying the brush, if you are use to Photoshop, then you will have to go through a learning curve because the Lightroom brush behaves somewhat differently. With the spot removal tool in Lightroom there is no sampling or pressing the alternate key to sample a particular area. Lightroom just makes an educated guess based on what you want to clone out. For instance, if we want to clone or remove a few sensor dust spots, simply set the spot tool to heal and use a proper size brush, with the opacity to the desired amount (100 recommended in this case), click on the dust spot, and Lightroom will automatically find areas in your image that have a similar colour and texture. Remember, where you click is the destination point and the other circle that the program generates is the source point (figure 1), which can be moved around easily via a click, hold and drag gesture on your mouse.

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