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. Strokes are editable inside the Spot Correct session — undo, redo, or reset — but once you Apply and save the result, the corrected pixels are baked into the saved file.

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

1. Click Spot Correct in the Editor header. The center canvas swaps to the Spot Correct editor.
2. Adjust the Brush size in the toolbar to match the blemish you want to fix.
3. Click the blemish. The tool samples a clean area nearby and paints it in.
4. Repeat for additional spots.
5. Click Apply to commit, or Cancel to discard.

Toolbar controls

Control	What it does
Brush	Sets the brush size. Match the size to the blemish — a touch larger is fine; much larger and you’ll affect surrounding clean pixels.
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.

Zoom and pan

The Spot Correct editor inherits the same zoom/pan controls as the rest of the Editor:

• Scroll to zoom centered on the cursor.
• Double-click to reset zoom to fit.
• Right-click drag or Alt + left-drag to pan when zoomed.

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 click. Lots of small clicks are easier to undo than one large area.
• If the result looks weird, the algorithm sampled from a poor source area. Undo and try again — different click positions can produce different samples.
• 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.

See also

• Editor overview
• Retouch — paint sharp pixels from an original source frame into the result.
• Defringe — neutralize chromatic-aberration color fringing without painting over detail.
• Saving — your corrections are baked into the saved file.