Cleaning up dust spots in DSLR video with Photoshop’s healing brush

[Jonathan Ziegler]

Hmmm, tough one. First, of course, either clean your sensor or send it off to be done as this will get rapidly tedious and worse over time – eventually making your camera unusable.

First off, FIND all your spots. This is a pretty good article: https://photographylife.com/how-to-spot-dust-on-your-dslr-sensor

2 ways:

1) create the spot fix as a development setting in camera raw (using ONLY the spot fixes), load your pix directly in camera raw and then apply the pre-made spot fix (use a sample image from the above article to try creating one). Remove spots that aren’t needed. Voila!

2) Make an action in Photoshop – basically, open a new image, start recording, place your spot heals, stop recording. When you open a new image, just apply the action. This will require every image to be the same size, of course (for example, my pix out of my camera are 5184 x 3448 so any corrections for photos would have to be that exact size).

I think the better way is the development setting in Camera Raw/Bridge.

Jonathan Ziegler
https://www.electrictiger.com/
520-360-8293

[Mark Gillespie]

Thanks…the spots developed while I was in the field shooting, and I couldn’t get the camera cleaned until I got back home. Trying to salvage the video and make it as clean as possible. It wasn’t actually a dust spot…the technicians advised me that Canon DSLR’s have a nasty little habit of throwing minute drops of lubricant off the shutter mechanism over time, and this is the second time I’ve had a dark spot in the same place that needed to be cleaned.

I’ll try these ideas on a clip…was able to clean them up frame by frame in the final output over the weekend with no loss of quality.

Thanks!

Mark