The Enthusiast's Guide to Night and Low-Light Photography, 1st Edition

49. REMOVING DUST AND SCRATCHES

WHEN YOU PHOTOGRAPH with wide open apertures like f/2.8 or f/4, you don’t see any of the dust and dirt that could be on the lens. But when you start to shoot exposures with a narrow aperture like f/16 or f/22, every piece of dust and dirt on your lens shows up in your images. No matter how clean I think my gear is, a 30-second exposure at f/16 will show me how wrong I am.

I usually try to remove the spots left by dust and scratches after I do noise reduction because the noise reduction often helps to minimize the smaller spots. The Adobe Camera Raw module has some of the best tools for dealing with dirt and scratches, ...