Lightroom Bites #001 - Visualising Spots

So here's a very quick little video just to show you one particular point in Lightroom editing. So I'm going to go into this landscape shot of a beach near Dublin. We're going to hit D for Develop to go into the Develop module. And what I want to do is I want to visualize spots today, so I want to find any sensor spots which might be, you know, needed to be cleaned up from this image. And to do this, we need to use the Clone tool. To open the Clone tool, you can either use the shortcut key, which is Q, or you can actually click up in the Clone tool icon up here. So now the Clone Tool is open and you can adjust your brush size and do all the normal stuff or whatever, but we want to see whether there are any sensor spots, typically up in the sky, and it's not very easy to do that when the colour image is presented as it is. Down on the bottom left-hand corner though of the screen, there's a little box called Visualise Spots, so you can either click on that with the the mouse, or you can hit the A key, and this is while the Clone Tool is open. The A key puts you into the Visualize Spots view, and as you can see now, we have a black and white view of the image, and we can adjust using this slider bar how much of the, the detail comes out. So as we slide to the left we've got less detail. As we slide to the right, now we're starting to see more detail come up in the sky, and it's quite easy now to see where these sensor spots are occurring. There's a little wrinkle to the Visualize Spots tool which I thought I'd tell you about. This came about as a question that came in from one of my talks. If you can't see the visualized spots option in the bottom left-hand corner. The T key hides and shows that toolbar, so if you press T, you can see it hiding and showing. So if you're seeing a picture with no visualized spots in the bottom left-hand corner when you press the Clone tool, that's the problem. So press T to bring it up. You can also go up to the View menu and show or hide the toolbar. Up there using the, using the menu itself, but the easiest way is just to press T. And then it's just a matter of sizing your Clone Tool around the sensor spot. I normally make my Clone Tool just a little bit bigger than the overall spot and then just hit Enter and just go over the different areas, and normally Lightroom will make a pretty good go of finding appropriate areas to clone from. So just do that to all the ones we can see, all the big ones anyway. Now that one looks a little odd as well. I'm just going to pull that one away.

I think these ones will be almost invisible. As you can see, I have a very dirty sensor. My Fuji X-T2.

And when you've finished, if you press the A key again, then you can go back.

And once you take your mouse off the image, those, those overlays will disappear.

If you want to hide the overlays in general, you press the H key, and the H key will hide any overlay from any of the tools.

And now you can scan around your image and you can see whether you've got any spots still occurring. I think there's maybe a little spot up here in the top left there, so I'm just going to just see whether I can get rid of that. Now I don't like how it's picked from a lighter area, so I'm going to try telling it to pick again using the forward slash key.

Keep pressing the forward slash key, it'll keep kind of resampling until you get something that looks a little, a little better.

There, that's a little better. And then to turn the Clone tool off, either click on it again or press the Q key again, and we're done.