Fast Clean-up Brush for Images

Especially on scanned images, you can get a lot of white specs showing up on the dark areas. It'll take forever to go over the image and clone them out and the Dust & Scratches filter is just too destructive to the rest of the image. Here's how to load a History Brush that will quickly clean up the image and leave the background texture intact.

First go to Filters >> Noise >> Dust & Scratches...

Choose a Radius of between 1 and 3 pixels, enough to get rid of the dust marks without blurring the image too much.

Leave the threshold at 0 levels and click OK.

Then go to the History Palette. Check the small box in front of  your latest operation, which is Dust & Scratches... and then go back to your pictures previous state. The picture will look unchanged but the Dusted version will be where the History Brush gets it's info.

Then select the history brush (y) and set the mode to Darken and select a big soft brush. The Darken mode will only affect areas less than 50% colored, it will allow the history brush to fill in the light areas on the image and leave the darker areas untouched. The bigger the brush, the larger area you can do at a swipe and naturally, you will need a bigger brush for images at higher resolutions.  You'll also want to soften the edges of the brush to avoid any rough transitions.

This is a great tool for brushing over a dark suit eliminating the white specs and leaving the cloth texture of the suit untouched. Avoid brushing over eyes and shiny objects as this brush will eliminate catchlights and small reflections and generally dull the appearance, which is why you didn't want to just apply the Dust & Scratches filter to the entire image to begin with.

A word of caution here; be careful when using this brush over a face or shiny surface because it will eliminate a lot of the small spectral highlights that contribute to the sharpness of an image. In other words, it will take the twinkle out of a person's eyes, use carefully.

Setting the mode to Lighten will eliminate the black dust marks that appear in transparency scans.

It's a great way to take the trash out of light skies. In Normal mode, you'll be able to apply the Dust & Scratches full affect to areas you brush over.

The History Brush is a great tool for cleaning up images quickly. I keep this brush and the healing tool handy and can blast through dirty images in no time.

For other Photoshop tips visit our help pages here.