From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Lightroom spotting tip

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Lightroom spotting tip

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- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode we are in Lightroom Classic CC. And here I want to highlight a workflow technique which is really helpful when you have to retouch away small spots on your photograph that result from having dust on the lens. Now, if I zoom in on this photograph, and click into the sky area, you can see there is a little dust spot that I had, because when I captured this photograph, I hadn't cleaned off my lens. So I need to clean all of those up. So how do we do that? And how do we do that more effectively with a little secret workflow technique? Well, let me show you. Well, first of all, we have a spot removal tool. We can choose Healing, we can set a feather amount or size, opacity, all the way up. We already probably know that. Next, what we can do is zoom in on the image, and we can use this navigator window to navigate around to try to find a spot. If we can't really see the spots very well, you can press the A key to turn on Visualize Spots. Now, all of a sudden, they are very noticeable, and you can change the slider in order to dial in the sensitivity so you can see the problem area of the photograph. Then we can tap the right bracket key to make our brush bigger, and then click and paint over that area in order to retouch that little spot or that problem. Now the only trouble with this is that to navigate around we either have to move this little navigator window, or we have to press the Space Bar key and use the hand tool, and we have to search around the image. And when we're searching this close, we're probably gonna miss one of these little spots. So there has to be a better way, right? Well, there is, and let me show you what it is. I'm gonna change my zoom rate, just so that I'm working on a larger part of the image so you can see this in the navigator panel. Can you see how I'm basically in this upper left quadrant. What you can do is zoom at any rate that you want, it doesn't really matter. I like to start in the upper left, zoom in and do your retouching there, whatever it is that you need to do. I have some spots. These are birds, so I can leave all of those. And then after you've done that, here's the shortcut, or here's the tip. You press the Page Down button. Do you see how it moved the zoom area down immediately underneath that? And then press Page Down again, it goes to the bottom. Now if I press it one more time, it moves just to the right of that. And then I can do the retouching there, press Page Down again, and do that area, Page Down, Page Down. And in this way, I can make sure that I'm covering all of my image. I will make sure that I haven't missed anything. And again, this works at any zoom rate. If I'm zoomed into 100 percent and I start in this upper left corner and press Page Down, you can see how it's moving down in very small increments. And that can be a great way to do your retouching, right. The whole point is using this Page Down or this Page Up technique, which allows you to navigate through your photograph. Now, after you've done all the retouching, just tap the A key, that will turn off the visualized spots there, and it will bring you back to the normal view of your photograph. Now, last but not least, if you have a smaller keyboard like I have, and if you don't have a Page Down button, and you're on a Mac, you can press Fn and then the Down Arrow key, and it does the same exact thing. All right, well, that's a wrap for this week. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Bye for now.

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