Visualize Spots

This is a bit of a quickie, but I only just learned it myself. It’s two tips in one. If you don’t already know, there’s a way to visualize the dust spots on your image when using the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom. Not surprisingly, it’s called Visualize Spots and you can click the little box in the lower left to toggle it on and off. That’s Tip #1.

The view you get once toggled is the bottom image above (click either image to make them larger). Makes it much easier to see what you’ve missed. However, it drives me mad to have to move the mouse from what I’m doing to check that little box on and off (because sometimes Lightroom’s efforts to heal a spot remind me of Cookie Monster eating a cookie – heavy-handed and less than subtle). Until now I’ve grumbled that there should be a shortcut to toggle this, but I didn’t let my mouse linger long enough for the shortcut to present itself. And then I stopped being so lazy about finding shortcuts to support my laziness, and I went looking for it. And for those that don’t know it – this is Tip #2 – the keyboard shortcut is A. Q for the Spot Removal Tool, A for the Visualize Spots Toggle.

Or you could clean your sensor, but there’s no keyboard shortcut for that.

*Don’t forget you can also sync the changes you make across multiple photographs, or just copy/paste the Develop settings and select only Spot Removal  to remove spots on many images at once – but I have never found this works for anything but images that are exactly the same. This is one of those instances where not taking the shortcut usually works best for me.