Dust Removal clarification
I asked a few questions on the dust removal tool help page a while ago. They appear to have gone unnoticed so I'll try here instead.
I find the description on the help page a little confusing. The tool itself appears to treat dust and spots as two separate things ("Remove Dust" / "Remove Spots"), but there are a number of references to "dust spots" on the help page.
Until Kevin Robbins pointed out how the tool works in a comment here, I thought that the "Remove Dust" / "Remove Spots" options in the drop-down menu affected the way the "Remove Dust" button worked (hence the request he commented on).
In one of Jack W's comments on the help page (here), it says:
The automatic functionality is intended for dust spots. Other "spots" could be anything, such as a star in a night sky – so the automatic functionality only applies to dust removal.
When changing to "Remove Spot" this is where you can manually remove spots/dusts. Keep this set to "Remove Dust" to ensure the automatic detection of dust in your images.
The last part here sounds as if you can only use the tool manually if it's set to "Remove Spots", and that auto detection is turned off with this setting. But the "Remove Dust" button still appears to work when "Remove Spots" is selected in the drop-down menu, and manual removal of dust still appears to work when you select "Remove Dust". How is this to be understood?
Another thing I find unclear is whether there's any difference between using the "Remove Dust" button and the tool's magic wand button. Do they make the same adjustments?
And one last thing. In the description above, it says "You can also use this cursor tool to manually remove dust spots by clicking on the affected areas and pressing the Backspace key" – this sounds as if you need to both click on a spot/fleck of dust and press the Backspace key in order to remove the dust/spot, which doesn't appear to be the case.
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The manual dust & spot removal tool has two modes
- dust - primarily intended for removing image blemishes caused by dust on the sensor
- spot - primarily intended for removing blemishes on the subject being photographed (for instance a pimple on a model's skin)
You can change between dust and spot in the tool itself by changing the drop down in the tool from dust to spot. Both can be used manually in the same manner (select the tool, adjust the brush size if needed, and click).
The difference between the two is the way that the healed part of the image is blended in to the area just around it. I've never noticed much difference in the result. I've just tried it again on an image where you could see a blemish in the blue sky probably caused by dust on the front of the. I tried it both ways, both gave a good result, and I couldn't see any difference.
If you use the magic wand instead of doing it manually, it seems to use dust not spot regardless of which you have set in the tool. What it does with the blemishes it detects is the same as it would have done if you had done it manually. (But you probably wouldn't have noticed all the dust spots the app found. In the image I just tried it found 57, though I had only noticed three on a cursory inspection!)
The reference to deleting them means that you can undo a particular dust/spot removal by selecting that one with the cursor, them pressing the backspace key.
Does that help?
Ian
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Thanks, Ian Wilson, that does indeed help.
Do you know if there's any difference between using the "Remove Dust" button and using the magic wand?
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I think they do the same thing. On the image I just tried with, the wand or the button both seemed to find the same 57 blemishes.
Ian
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Thanks for your help.
Thomas
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