Quick Tip: Getting Better Results From Lightroom’s Spot Removal Tool

This a quick little tip, but it’s sure a handy one. 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.

How long did it take me to get there? About three-seconds — thanks to that keyboard shortcut.

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

Cheers,

-Scott

P.S. A big thanks to RC Concepcion for his great tip yesterday on Smart Collection ideas.