Spot Correct

The Spot Correct button in the Editor header opens a spot-removal brush. It’s designed for small fixes — dust on the sensor, a stray piece of debris on a leaf, a tiny blown highlight — not for major content removal.

Renamed: this tool was called Retouch before. The name Retouch now refers to the tool that paints pixels from an original source frame into the result (previously “Source Cloning”). See Retouch.

What it does

The Spot Correct tool samples pixels from a clean nearby area and paints them over wherever you brush. It’s a content-aware spot-healing brush, similar to the one in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Press Q in the Editor to open it — Lightroom’s Spot Removal key. (Unlike R for Crop, a second Q does not apply; use Apply or Esc.) The key is remappable, and the toolbar button shows its current binding.

Strokes are editable inside the Spot Correct session — undo, redo, or reset. Apply commits them to the result and records each one as a step on the image’s edit history, so Apply isn’t a point of no return: ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z outside the editor steps your corrections back one at a time, and each shows as its own row in the HISTORY timeline.

Heal and Clone

Spot Correct has two modes, and the difference between them is who picks the source area:

Mode	Source	How you use it
Heal (default)	The tool finds one for you	Click a blemish, or drag across a larger one
Clone	You pick it yourself	⌥-click / Alt-click to set the source, then drag to paint

Heal handles the large majority of spots. Reach for Clone when Heal picks a poor source, or when you need to carry something specific across the repair — continuing a hair or an edge straight through a dust speck, for instance.

Clicking versus dragging

Click a speck and it’s repaired straight away. Drag and the brush paints a blue mask over everything you cover; the whole painted area is repaired in one go when you let go of the mouse.

That “on release” part is deliberate, not a delay. Repairing each brush dab as you go would make every dab copy from pixels the previous dabs had just repaired, and the repeated blending drifts — on a smooth background it leaves a visible smear along the stroke. Treating the stroke as one area, repaired once, is both cleaner and faster.

So: use a click for a dust speck, and a drag for a hair, a scratch, or anything longer than the brush.

How Heal fills the spot

Heal finds a good donor patch nearby, copies the real texture out of it, and blends it into the spot so the seam disappears. Because it moves genuine texture rather than smearing color inward, it holds up on the things macro shooters actually spot out — hair, scales, gills, bokeh — and on a genuinely smooth background it’s indistinguishable from a plain fill.

For a stroke, brightness and color always come from the pixels immediately around the stroke, and the donor supplies only the fine texture on top. That split is why a repair can’t take on the lighting of wherever the donor happened to sit — the thing that used to show up as a faintly lighter or darker patch across a long stroke. Texture is also matched in strength to the surroundings, so a repair doesn’t come back grainier than the area around it.

If no usable donor is within reach — hard against the image edge, or surroundings so unusual that nothing nearby matches — the repair keeps the surrounding color but has no texture to add. You never pick the algorithm, the tool decides. Without a donor it can’t invent texture, so on a detailed area it can leave a slightly soft patch. If a correction looks smudged, that’s usually what happened — undo and work slightly differently so a donor comes into reach.

How Clone works

Clone copies pixels from your source area to wherever you paint, straight — no tone matching. That’s the trade: Heal blends its repair into the surrounding brightness, while Clone gives you exactly the pixels you pointed at, so pick a source whose brightness already matches the spot.

⌥-click (Alt-click) sets the source. A crosshair marks it, and once you start painting a second, dashed circle shows where the brush is reading from right now. That offset between source and brush is held as you paint, and it carries over to later strokes too — so a repair made of several strokes stays lined up with the source instead of restarting from it each time. ⌥-click somewhere new to re-anchor.

Until you set a source, Clone won’t paint — the toolbar shows an amber ⌥-click to set a source prompt.

Clone paints on a drag, so in this mode a plain left-drag no longer pans. Use right-drag, middle-drag, ⌘/Ctrl-drag, or the hold-to-pan key instead.

If you’ve set your hold-to-pan key to ⌥/Alt, both gestures still work — they’re told apart by click versus drag, the same way Photoshop does it: ⌥-click sets the source, ⌥-drag pans.

When to use it

Common macro photography use cases:

Sensor dust that appears as small dark spots in the background.
Stray debris — a hair, a fiber, a speck of pollen — on the subject or background that you didn’t notice at the time.
Blown highlights from flash specularity — a tiny white spot on a wet surface, for example.
Sharpening artifacts from earlier in your edit — a small halo or ring.

For larger content removal (a whole leaf in the background, a distracting branch), use a dedicated raster editor like Photoshop after saving a TIFF.

The Spot Correct flow

Click Spot Correct in the Editor header. The center canvas swaps to the Spot Correct editor.
Adjust the Brush size in the toolbar to match the blemish you want to fix.
Click the blemish — or drag across it if it’s longer than the brush. The tool samples a clean area nearby and paints it in.
Repeat for additional spots.
If a spot comes out badly, switch to Clone, ⌥-click a source you like, and paint it in by hand.
Click Apply to commit, or Cancel to discard.

Your adjustments while you work

The canvas shows the image with your Adjustments applied — your exposure, white balance, contrast and any mask work — so a spot is judged against the picture you are going to save.

Spots are still removed from the raw pixels underneath. Adjustments are non-destructive: they sit on top of the image and are applied again every time it is drawn or saved, so your masks, sliders and crop all stay live through a Spot Correct session and Apply only touches the plain pixels. Nothing is baked in twice.

Untick Adjustments in the toolbar — or press A — to work on the raw pixels instead. The setting is remembered between sessions, and Retouch and Defringe each keep their own.

With Adjustments on, the canvas redraws at a reduced size first and sharpens up the part you are looking at a moment later — the same thing the main Editor canvas does. You will see it as a brief softness after a zoom or a pan, never while painting.

Control	What it does
Heal / Clone	Picks who chooses the source area — the tool (Heal) or you (Clone). Heal is the default. ⇧Q / Shift+Q switches between them, matching Lightroom.
Brush	Sets the brush size — the radius in image pixels, 4–200, shown beside the slider. It’s the image’s own pixels, so the number stays put when you zoom. Match the size to the blemish — a touch larger is fine; much larger and you’ll affect surrounding clean pixels. [ / ] shrink and grow it from the canvas, and so does ⌘+scroll / Ctrl+scroll.
Adjustments (A)	Show the canvas with your Adjustments applied. On by default. Spots are removed from the raw pixels underneath either way. Remembered between sessions. See Your adjustments while you work.
Undo	Undo the last stroke.
Redo	Re-apply an undone stroke.
Reset	Clear all strokes; return to the original image.
Cancel	Exit the Spot Correct editor and discard all strokes.
Apply	Commit the strokes to the result, recording each as an edit-history step.

Zoom and pan

Left-click places a spot and left-drag paints, so panning needs a modifier or a different button. The editor lists the controls on a row just below the image, above the toolbar, so you don’t have to remember them:

Action	Control
Place a spot (Heal)	Left-click
Paint an area to repair (Heal)	Left-drag — repaired on release
Set the clone source (Clone)	⌥-click / Alt-click
Paint (Clone)	Left-drag
Pan	right-drag, middle-drag, ⌘-drag / Ctrl-drag, or a drag with the hold-to-pan key. That key is configurable — Spacebar (the default), ⌥/Alt, Shift or ⌘/Ctrl — so ⌥-drag pans only while ⌥ is the one selected (and not in Clone mode, which claims ⌥-click for the source); ⌘/Ctrl-drag and the mouse-button drags always pan
Zoom	Scroll (centered on the cursor)
Resize the brush	[ / ], or ⌘+scroll / Ctrl+scroll

Scroll back out to return to fit — the editor opens at fit, and double-click deliberately does nothing here, since it was too easy to trigger by accident mid-brushing.

The zoom readout sits in the bottom-left corner as it does on the main canvas: it shows the current magnification, and clicking it picks a percentage directly. A plain click on it never places a spot, and holding ⌥/Alt to set a clone source still works over it.

Zoom in to 100% (or higher) before correcting small spots — at fit-to-window zoom, you’ll oversize the brush and affect surrounding pixels you didn’t mean to.

Tips

Zoom in first. Correcting spots at fit zoom is imprecise. Zoom to at least 100% before placing strokes.
One blemish per stroke. Separate clicks and strokes are easier to undo than one sprawling area — and a compact stroke gives the tool a better chance of finding a matching donor.
If the result looks weird, Heal sampled from a poor source area. Undo and try again — different click positions can produce different samples. If it keeps missing, switch to Clone and pick the source yourself.
In Clone, watch the dashed circle, not the brush. It shows what you’re about to lay down.
Don’t over-correct. Tiny specks are part of macro photography. Removing them when they’re not distracting is busywork; focus on the ones that pull your eye away from the subject.