Apple’s Aperture has a unique tool for the job

It’s no secret that image sensors in digital cameras with removeable lenses are prone to atrract dust. The Canon EOS 5D I use seems to be especially bad in this regard from what I have read on the various chat boards. While I give my sensor a swipe with the anti-static brush now and then, the reality is that sensor dust does crop up and can be a real problem if many snaps are exposed with the dust mote in place on the sensor.

The one positive about all of this is that Apple’s Aperture has a tool to remove such dust spots, as the designers recognized that any particular speck of sensor dust will have the exact same position on the resulting photographs from image to image. The dust mote does not move even if the camera does.

Apple’s Aperture provides a tool, unique as far as I can tell, which permits rapid removal of sensor dust from mutiple images. So if you have just taken two hundred pictures only to find an offending dust spot in each, at the same location, the Aperture Lift and Stamp tool is for you.

Here’s how it works. In this picture you can see the Spot and Patch tools cross-haired locator at the top of the image, where the offending dust spot makes its home:

Hit enter and the circle becomes yellow, effecting removal of the spot on the selected image:

Unlike with Photoshop, there is no need to select a source for the patch – Aperture does it automatically based on the area sorrounding the defect.

Now click on the Lift part of the Lift and Stamp tool icons visible at the top of the screen – it’s the one with the arrow pointing up.

The type is small here, but the original discloses that I have made four adjustments – Spot & Patch, Exposure, Highlights & Shadows and Sharpening.

Now highlight all the images with a like dust defect (Shift-Click for contiguous ones or Control-Click for non-adjacent ones), click the Stamp icon of the Lift and Stamp tool (the one with the arrow pointing down) and click on any one of the selected images.

The dust mote is removed in all of them. In my case, as I have also made Exposure, Highlight & Shadow and Sharpening adjustments, these would also be conferred on all these images. So if the images are different, do the Spot & Patch and Lift & Stamp work first, then selectively change other parameters in images as you please. The images selected for dust removal can be versions of one image, disparate images, or both.

Don’t forget to clean the camera’s sensor after doing this!

See what I mean about good design? Care to find this feature in Photoshop? I think not.