- [Instructor] Lightroom Classic's Spot Removal tool
is a simple retouching brush.
It's great for removing spots
and performing some easy repairs.
This image of roses can be found in the Chapter 7
0707 folder if you want to follow along with me.
The Spot Removal tool is the second tool
in the tool strip, just below the histogram here.
We can click on it to open it or press the Q key.
There are two modes in the Spot Removal tool.
We see those in the right corner here, clone and heal.
Let me demonstrate for you what the differences are.
I'm going to make the brush quite a bit bigger,
so I'll just crank the size up.
And then, well, let's go even bigger than that.
And then over here in the right corner where it's white,
I'm just going to paint a spot.
Now, the way this tool works is it automatically
goes out and finds a source for you.
And Lightroom was pretty smart and it picked
the source that has more white area,
but I want to demonstrate this by taking the source
and dragging it up onto the rose.
Notice how the rose is getting picked up from the source
and blended into the white background.
And that's because we have the setting on heal.
If we change the setting to clone,
we get an exact copy or duplicate of it,
just like if you rubber stamped it.
Usually, I leave this on heal,
because it'll blend in your source
with the area that you are repairing,
and it usually does a really great job with that.
Now I want to delete this 'cause we don't
actually want to do this to the image.
It's actively selected, and I can tell that
because both of these dots are black and not gray.
So with it actively selected, I can hit the Delete key
on my keyboard to make it disappear.
Now we could take a look at how to remove spots in an image,
and this is where Lightroom's
Spot Removal tool really excels.
If we come down to the toolbar,
we can turn on the Visualize Spots,
and then it's really easy to find these
dust spots that are down here.
So I'll make my brush size smaller to do this.
And this time I'm going to use the left
bracket key to make it smaller.
So the left bracket key reduces the size.
The right bracket key makes it larger.
And I just want to make it just a little bit bigger
than the spot I'm going to remove.
And then with a single click, Lightroom will go out
and find a source and replace that spot.
So let's just go around and very quickly repair these.
So I made the brush a little bit larger
for that one with my right bracket key.
There's one up here.
There's another one in the corner up here.
Now we can turn off the Visualize Spots
and see how that looks.
We can barely see those brushes on the white background,
but if I hover over 'em, they'll pop up.
So we see all these spots that we removed.
Let's take a look at how we might use this
to do something a little bit more complicated.
I'm going to hold down my spacebar
to temporarily get the zoom tool,
and then click on this leaf and then position it
into the center of my screen.
Again, I'll reduce the size of my brush
using my left bracket key.
And this time I'm going to paint over that tear.
So let's get a little bit smaller,
and I'm just holding my mouse button down
and I'm painting over this entire torn area
of the leaf that I want to repair.
Now, Lightroom came out and it found
another part of the leaf and said,
"Well, we'll replace this or patch it with this section."
But I think if I line this up with the vein,
I might be able to get something
a little bit more realistic-looking.
So it's not perfect, but you can see how
you can do some real basic repairs like this.
Let's take a look at a couple more of these settings
before we finish this up.
We have the brush size and opacity.
I think the opacity's pretty obvious.
So let me explain the feather.
Right now it's set to zero.
Let's make the brush larger so we can see.
We just see a single ring around the diameter of the brush.
But as I take the feather up, now there's two rings,
and that is the distance of the feather.
So if you want a really soft edge of something you paint,
you can increase the feather.
Most of the time when you're removing spots, though,
you'll probably leave the feather at a very low amount.
When you're done with your retouching,
you can click the Done to close out of it,
but at any time, you can come back.
All of this is nondestructive
and we can go back and change it at any time.
So I'll click on the Spot Removal tool again,
and notice, there's a really light gray dot.
So as we hover over it, we'll see it better.
If you click on that, now it's active.
And while it's active, we could reposition this,
maybe make it even a little bit better.
So you can see that the Spot Removal tool is great
for removing the sensor dust spots
and other minor imperfections.
But if your image has more complex repair needs
like the tears in these leaves,
Photoshop offers a much better solution for that.
I recommend using Lightroom's Spot Removal tool
for your dust spots and other quick basic retouching
that doesn't have to be perfect.