Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography - right here on Adorama TV.
I'm Mark Wallace I'm a working photographer.
Today I am in the very busy
city of Santiago, Chile,
and I am out and about trying to get some
photographs of the city.
Well one of the things that
you'll discover no matter if you're a
traveling photographer or studio
photographer, you're gonna find that
eventually you're gonna get dust in your camera.
Now how do we deal with that nastiness,
well the nice thing is we can
always clean our cameras.
There are some modes that allow us to
open up the sensor,
and use a little thing like this.
We can blow that dust out,
we can send our cameras in to have them
professionally cleaned,
but no matter what you do,
eventually you're gonna have
some dust spots in your camera,
on the images, you're gonna have to deal with
those in some way.
Well the nice thing is that Lightroom has
some really effective ways,
to deal with dust, and once you've
done that, you can apply those settings,
you can apply those cleanup settings to
multiple photos, which will really help
you to speed up your post processing workflow.
So what we're gonna do now is,
I'm going to open up Lightroom and walk
you through this really amazing tool,
it's super simple, and it'll save you
hours, I'm in the library module of Adobe
Lightroom classic, now what we're going
to do here is, we're going to look at an
image and look at all the different dust
spots that are in the image, and then
once we have those we're going to remove
them, and then tell Lightroom to do the
same exact thing automatically to all
the other images in our session, that way
we only have to do the work once and
Lightroom does the rest for us.
Now it's important to note that this only works
for images that we shoot around the same
time, so it could be a studio session
that maybe lasts a few hours, or a full
day, it could be a scenic session that's
a day, it could be a street photo session,
whatever, but you can't do this for
images that were shot weeks or months
apart, it's important to note.
The other thing that's important to note is,
we can automatically remove things like
the dust spots from our sensor like these
two spots here, but if we look up here we
see this smudge right, here this is not
on our sensor this is on the wall of the
studio, we can notice that we just going
to the next image, you
can see there's the smudge there, so it's
not in the same place of the sensor, so
we can't have Adobe Lightroom classic
automatically do the work for us.
We're going to have to remove that ourselves,
now what we're going to do here is,
just to show you, don't to start with the very
first image.
I'm going to start with this third image in
and to help us visualize
that, this is our master image, the one
that we're starting with, and then we're
going to tell everything else to copy it.
I'm going to set this, a red label just
so we can see that it's different from
the rest, you don't have to do that,
that's just for us to help understand
what we're doing here okay?
Now the other thing to note here is,
when we zip into this image,
it's difficult to see where the spots are,
that's okay because Lightroom has tools
for that as well, so we're going to go to
the develop module,
now we have a special tool it's right
over here, it's called the spot removal
tool, you can either click on it or hit Q,
that's the shortcut key, once we do that
we have this little circle and we can
click on the spots to remove them, but
before we do that let's figure out where
these spots are, we can do that the
old-fashioned way by just zooming in and
looking around, we can see there's a spot
right there, and what I can do here is, I
can change the size of this tool, I can
click on that spot, Adobe Lightroom the
classic is going to look and say this
looks like an area that's clean.
I can pull from that,
and then put that here,
you can move this around, if it gets it
wrong so maybe it's pulling from the
dress, we don't want that, we can move
this around, we can shrink this, we can do
all kinds of stuff to these to fine
tune them.
Okay so let's keep looking for
our little spots, they're sort of hard to
find, so what we're going to do is use a
special little thing in the toolbar,
so the toolbar is down here, if yours is
not showing up you need to hit T, you hit
T it'll disappear, you hit T again it'll
show up, there's a little thing here that
says visualize spots, we want to click
this little square here to turn that on,
there's also a slider here so depending
on if your image is dark or bright you
might have to slide this to the right or
to the left to see
the effect, these are dark images, so I'm
going to slide this to the right, and
when I do a woah man look at that...
these spots just show up like stars in
the night, we can see exactly where that
problem areas are in our image, so then
we can go in here we can zoom in, we can
zip around, we can see yeah, that needs to
be fixed, so I'm going to click on that.
This is a little image here, I'm going to
have to fix that, then we can just go
through here, and start figuring out
exactly where we need to fix things,
we can either do it that way, or we can turn
visualize spots off, and do it the
old-fashioned way, just eyeballing it, and
zipping around with our tool.
Okay so now once we have a few of those selected,
what we want to do is we want to apply
these settings to all of our images.
I didn't spend very much time here,
obviously I would normally spend a lot
more time to get everything out,
but we just want to zip right along,
so once I'm done here, I can close this
tool now, just a note, any time in the
future if you want to see where you've
removed spots,
you can just click on this, and hover
over the image, and everything will sort
of show up.
If you turn that back off,
then that will go away, okay we're going
to go into the library because we want
to tell a Lightroom to apply what we
just did from the master image to
everything else.
So I'm going to go back
to the grid view by hitting G, here's the
image that we started with, this one
right here, now notice we have horizontal
and vertical images, it doesn't matter
because the dots on our sensor are on
the same place on the sensor.
It doesn't matter which way the camera is oriented,
these dots are going to be in the same
place, so Lightroom is smart enough to
know that.
So what I'm going to do here
is hit click this first image, then I'm
going to click this last image, so this
is the first, second, third, so shift click,
so what I'm going to tell Lightroom to
do is, to take the settings from this
photo, and apply it to these two others
so I can do that by going down here, and
clicking sync settings, now normally
everything would be checked, I'm going to
say check none, I only want to apply the
spot removal because if I've cropped or
I've done some tonality adjustments or
white balance things I don't want to
overwrite those from
this image, I just want to apply this
spot removal, so then I'll click
synchronize, so now watch what happens,
they go to one of these two images,
I go to the develop module,
the spot removal tool,
if I hover over, notice it's already
applied that spot removal to those images.
We can easily do this to the rest
of our images, again I'm going to click
the master photo, that's the one with the
red here, go to the very last image in
this session, hit shift and click, and go
sync settings spot removal, is already
selected.
I will synchronize, and now all the spots
on all of these images are removed,
even the vertical images, so we can go into
the develop module, and click on this,
hover over and notice that all the
vertical images, the spots removed
just like the horizontal images,
and that is all there is to it.
You can save yourselves hours and hours
of time just using these simple techniques.
Well, thanks for joining me for this episode
of Exploring Photography,
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right now.
Thanks again for watching,
and I'll see you again next time.