How do I Edit Photos to Get Rid of Spots?

Some unwanted spots appear on glass surfaces.

Sometimes unwanted spots or artifacts appear on photographs. Spots and artifacts can result from various factors. Small dust particles that rest on the lens or your camera catches in the wind can easily show up on a photograph. Photographs that are taken with cameras that have detachable lens systems may have spots because of particles that enter the camera back during lens removal. Digital noise or grain are spots that are caused by tiny particles in the environment that reflect light at high ISO values or with high-speed film. Photo editing software application have healing, spot-removal, stamp and color-replacement features to edit photos to get rid of spots.

Things You'll Need

• Photo editing software

Instructions

1. Launch a photo editing application and open a photo with spots that you want to edit.

2. Select the spot-healing or spot-removal brush or tool, clone stamp or color replacement brush from the applications toolbar or tool menu.

3. Set the opacity or intensity of the tool at 100 percent or at the highest setting for that tool or brush.

4. Set the tool or brush mode by selecting either "darken" or "lighten" mode in the tool or brush preferences or options panel. Use "darken" to remove spots that are lighter than the color tones around the spot. Use "lighten" to remove spots that are darker than the color tones around the spot.

5. Set the size of the brush or tool on the preferences or option panel by entering the pixel width, or click-and-dragging the tick mark on sizing the tool or brush sizing chart. Hover over a particular spot, and adjust the size of the tool until it is slightly larger than a specific spot that you want to remove.

6. Choose the color-value of a clone stamp or color replacement tool or brush by sampling areas on the photo that match the color-tone that should replace the spot. Use sampling color-tones that are as close to the spot as possible to ensure accurate color readings. The "darken" mode will replace all pixels within the spot that are lighter than the sampling area with an average of the dark color values in the sampling area. The "lighten" mode will replace all pixels within the spot that are darker than the sampling area with an average of the light color values in the sampling area. You do not need to define a sampling zone for healing or spot removal brushes and tools.

7. Center the tool or brush over a spot that is slightly smaller than the tool, and click on the spot to perform the adjustment.

8. Continue removing the rest of the spot on the photo by resizing the tool or brush to make the size slightly larger than each spot that you are removing and defining the sampling area for the clone stamp or color-replacement tools and brushes.