Get Rid of Specks on Multiple Photos With Adobe Bridge CS3

In continuation of sharing the knowledge I’ve learnt at the Adobe Creative License Tour, here is a tutorial for efficiently fixing those photos which have specks on them due to dust on the lens. The tool you will need to execute this is Adobe Bridge CS3.

To get started, open up Bridge and navigate to the folder which contains all your tarnished photos.

Although you might not see it, there are specks on these photos. Here is a zoomed up version to help explain the specks I’m referring to:

I never saw this speck of dust while reviewing my photos on the LCD!

Specks can ruin an entire series of photos. The biggest issue is that you don’t even know that there is dust on your lens until you import them onto your computer and review them. Even though many digital cameras allow for review of photos through an LCD display, it is often just too small to catch these specks. Adobe has recognized this issue and came up with an awesome solution to this problem.

The next step in removing these specks is to select all your photos. While all your photos are selected in Bridge, right click any one of them and select Open in Camera Raw…

What should happen next is that you should see a new window with the photos you selected in the left pane. If you’re missing photos that you wanted to retouch, you did the last step incorrectly, so try it again.

You should see all the photos you selected in the left pane

If all is well, press the Select All button above the left pane.

Remove specks one-by-one? Heck no, Bridge will do ‘em all!

Upon doing so, all your photos in the left pane should become selected. This will allow us to do retouching to all your photos at once. This is really efficient because the location of the speck of dust should be consistent throughout your photos. Bridge is also smart enough to know which photos were taken in landscape and portrait mode, so even though you may think that speck is in a different location because of the orientation of the photo, put some faith in Bridge. It will probably know what it’s doing.

And now, the meat and potatoes of the process. With all photos selected, click the retouch tool button:

A new toolbar should appear. By default the Type should be Heal, if it’s not, set it to Heal.

Next, in the main panel (with a large version of your first photo), click a spot which will be your source for healing. As an example with my photo, I aimed for a spot in the clouds (the red circle/dot is the spot I clicked):

Then you will want to adjust how much of this source you will want to take. To do so, adjust the radius in the toolbar that appeared when you selected the Retouch tool. Adjust it so that the circle is about the size of the speck.

Now hover your cursor over that circle and click and drag the circle to the speck.

And just like that, the speck is gone. What you will want to do next is review all your photos because as we can see with my last photo, it turns out the source I used for healing wasn’t appropriate for this photo:

As you may figure, it’s pretty intuitive to adjust your source; just move the green circle.

After you’re done reviewing your photos and are happy with the results, click done and all the retouching will be applied to your photos. (Note: You will need to open up your photos through Bridge to see the changes.)

To see the full results you can get, here is a before and after shot of the ’shoes’ photo: