Touching Up Lens Grit

We all get them - those little black blobs or lines in the image. They come from a number of sources: a dirty filter (which can hardly be helped when shooting on a beach with salt spray blowing), a dirty lens (always clean your lens before using a filter!) or (horrors) a dirty sensor. What can be done about these blobs after the fact? First, do something before the fact. I carry a LensPen with me for touch ups and for its enclosed brush, but for real cleaning I use a micro cloth and solution specifically designed for cleaning optics, such as Eclipse Optic Lens Cleaning Solution. I have not yet tried any sensor cleaning products, but I am interested in the various VisibleDust products.

But I digress. We were talking about cleaning up your images, not your lenses. In the past I would do this in Photoshop with the clone or healing tools on a separate layer. This worked great, unless I decided to tweak the color temperature of the photo layer or something, then all of the locations where I had healed would pop right out of the image and I would have to redo the touch up. Now I do the cleaning in Adobe RAW. Yes, this can be done during the RAW conversion! And what is really nice is that if the RAW file is placed in Photoshop as an object, the RAW converter can be reopened on the object and the spot corrections can be modified. Changing any other setting such as temperature or shadows or vibrance are automatically applied to the corrections.

So the next time you open up that image which on the LCD looked so wonderful and find it full of little dark blobs, try some RAW spot healing. Then get out your real world cleaning tools and clean up your lenses and filters!