Sensor dust can be an absolute pain sometimes. No matter how clean we try to keep our cameras, it just seems to creep in there when we least expect it – and often when it has the most impact on our shots. There are tools in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw to let us clean it up, but we often have to zoom in and drag the image around, hoping that we find them all.
This neat trick from photographer Anthony Morganti makes this an easy systematic task with one simple keypress. I’ve been zooming and manually dragging images around in Adobe Camera Raw for years, and never knew I could do this. Now it’ll make cleaning up images a breeze.
The simple keypress is just the “Page Down” key. On a Mac where you might not have a page down key, Anthony suggests that the Function + Down arrow key does the same job. Essentially, after you zoom in to the top left corner of your image, it moves down your image one zoomed-in square at a time. Once it gets to the bottom of the image, it repeats from the top from the next zoomed-in portion across.
And, yes, hitting page up has the reverse effect, going back to the previous zoomed-in area, or allowing you to start from the bottom right instead of the top left.
In the video, Anthony shows the feature off using Lightroom, but I just tested with the latest Adobe Camera Raw as well as the final version of ACR for CS6 (ACR v9.1.1) and it works in those, too, so Adobe’s had this easy shortcut key available for a while. I wish I’d known about it sooner.
I really need to start pressing random buttons more often in software to see if it does something unexpected.
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