Hi Team, Sometimes I need to eliminating a major Dust Spot thats appeared on a long sequence, this can be very time consuming to do manually, so my question is:

When during the LRT Visual workflow - is the best time to use the healing brush / clone tool on the raw files to remove major dust spots?

I've tried this with the raw files at the end of the visual workflow, then synchronised the metadata and of course - I lost all of the transitions created by LRT. Very frustrating.

My current solution is to first render out the intermediary Jpegs from Lightroom, then import them again into LR and run a Dust Removal Pass.
Is this the only way or is there a more efficient way that will keep all the grading transitions created by LRT intact?

Thanks, Mark

Normally, if you do the regular workflow, and edit the individual dust spots between the keyframes at the very end before exporting, they wont break.

In the regular workflow, you don't "synchronize" - only from one keyframe to the next (with the sync script) - and this will not affect the images inbetween.
The only action that would affect those images, would be the "Auto Transition" this would overwrite any individual corrections on non-keyframe images. You can prevent it from touching the stamping via clone tool, by holding "Shift" when clicking on Auto Transition.

All in all from my experience: stamping dust ist always a tedious process. You better avoid getting dust at all by cleaning your sensor frequently and not shooting with the aperture too closed.

To make dust less apearant when editing, you can also use a clever editing with gradients, negative clarity / texture / contrast on the sky - you might add a range mask to isolate the sky where the dust would be most apearant. This often helps and is way better then staping individual images. Mostly you would see that stamping when playing back the timelapse anyway.

Hope I could help!

Thanks so much Gunther and apologies for my lack of reply earlier, I completely missed your response.
I'll definitely be cleaning my sensors more regularly in future!

Hey your ideas are great for more effective seamless dust removal, especially the idea of using a range mask is a great one, just checked that out on Lightroom. I take it LRT includes range masks in its auto transition protocols hey?

Thanks again, Mark

That's why I recommended it. :-)

Is it possible to have LRT use the keyframe spot removal data only and write just that to the intermediary frames? Part of that would be using the heal function as well.

I understand that holding Shift when clicking the auto transition button keeps it from touching the stamping via the clone tool.

The sequence I am currently working on has uniform spots starting roughly 1/3 of the way in thanks to a gust of wind and snow being deposited on the UV filter. After a certain point, the spots are uniform and could not be removed from the filter during the shot sequence.

Not easly. But you could just apply the healing to the whole sequence via LRT and auto transition and then, before exporting, remove the healing from the start of the subsequence that shouldn't have it and then selectively sync only the healing (which is now unset) to the subsequence where you don't want it. After that export.

Thank you for your reply!

I have been doing some of that but am still working on keeping the keyframe to keyframe edits that are not spot removal from being overwritten. Your suggestion may help me do that.