Getting Better Results From Lightroom’s Spot Removal Tool

I’ve shared this tip before, but I had a guy ask me about this problem at my seminar this week in Philly, so I thought it was worth sharing again.

If you’re using the Spot Removal tool to remove a spot or a blemish and the results look kind of funky, it’s probably because the tool didn’t pick a similar enough area (text, tone and/or content wise) to give you a good fix. Take a look at the image below.

Above: The upper circle (the one with the white arrow pointing at it) is where the part I wanted to remove is located, but look at the lower circle where it sampled from. A fairly lame choice, and of course the fix doesn’t look realistic. Of course, I can grab the top circle and try to find a better location for the tool to sample from, but that’s where this tip comes in handy — you can have Lightroom do it for you:

Just press the ‘/’ (the slash key) on your keyboard, and Lightroom will instantly pick a different spot to sample from (see below).

Above: When I pressed the / key, it picked an entirely different spot. It was better, but it wasn’t great, so I just hit that same / (slash) key again.

Above: the third time’s a charm! A much better location and my retouch looks a lot better.

Hope you find that helpful next time you’re removing spots, specs, or retouching (removing wrinkles, blemishes, etc.).

Have a great weekend everybody (I’m not shooting any games this week – the Bucs are on the road, so I’ll just be watching at home).

Best,

-Scott