Repairing a photograph

Press Q to remove spots or paint longer repairs using source material from the same photograph.

The REPAIRS section sits above LAYERS. Repairs belong to the selected treatment and count as edits even when no sliders have changed.

1. Press Q or click the bandage button to activate Repair.
2. Click a blemish for a round spot, or hold ⌥ and drag to paint a stroke. Drag an empty area without ⌥ to pan the photograph.
3. Select a repair to adjust Mode, Size and Feather or move its source.
4. Click Done, press esc, or press Q to finish and hide all markers. Spots apply immediately; keep clicking to add more without finishing each one.

Repair keeps the crop, straighten and zoom. It disables other canvas tools and hides the magnifying glass. Automatic sources can come from outside the crop.

Heal and Clone. Heal blends the source into surrounding tone. Clone copies pixels unchanged and suits hard edges. New repairs default to Heal. Mode, Size and Feather affect selected repairs; with none selected, they set the next repair. Mixed selections show neither mode selected. Feather controls edge softness. For round spots and strokes drawn with Snap off, Frames limits feathering relative to the repair’s size to preserve coverage at its centre. Increasing Feather beyond this limit does not soften the edge further.

Size and feather readouts. The Size and Feather values are radii in pixels at the photograph’s full resolution. Feather shows the amount applied after the size limit, so its readout can stop increasing before the slider reaches its maximum.

Press - to reduce Size or = to increase it while Repair is active or a repair is selected. The keys change the selected repair, or the next spot’s size when nothing is selected. Each press changes Size by one step; holding the key does not repeat it.

Automatic source. Frames searches nearby rings for matching material outside the repaired area. A dashed shape and dotted connector show the source. Each photograph finds its own source. Drag the source grip to pin a different area; its hollow grip becomes filled. Use Spots to select an existing repair, then drag its source on the photo. Source → Automatic lets Frames choose again.

Long strokes can use up to eight nearby source segments. Dragging their source pins the entire stroke to one source region.

Snap. A stroke can expand to cover a detected object it crosses, such as a bird, sign or person. Turn Snap off to use only the painted line. The status shows Finding things… during detection or Nothing detected when no objects are found. The painted stroke is retained in either case.

Select and move. With Repair active, click a spot to select it. Click again to deselect, or use Add spot to return to placement settings. Drag a spot’s ring to move it with its source; the drag is one undo step. Individual map spots can move without changing the saved map. Painted strokes cannot be moved by dragging their rings.

The section header counts repairs. Spots opens a scrollable list inside the Repairs section, including expandable dust maps. The list leaves the photo unobstructed while you work on the photo: selecting a spot in either place selects it in both, and the list expands and scrolls to reveal photo selections. Select a spot to adjust its Mode, Size, Feather and Source in the aligned controls below the list, toggle its eye, or delete it. Changes apply immediately and support undo. The … menu holds Sync spots, Apply dust map, Save spots as dust map and Manage dust maps.

Hide and delete. The eye temporarily disables a repair while keeping its ring selectable. ⌫ removes the selected repair. Selecting a spot on the photo or in the list adjusts only that spot, including spots from a map. Select the map’s named row to adjust the whole map.

With no repair selected, ⌫ goes to the finding picked out in the Composition panel, and with none picked out there it rejects the photograph. Use \ to keep it again if this was unintended.

Overlay. Press V to cycle tint, zebra, matte and off for the selected repair or map. The overlay also works for disabled repairs. Selecting a repair deselects the mask layer, and selecting a layer returns overlay control to it.

All rings appear while Repair is active; disabled repairs have fainter rings. Holding / hides the edits and rings, restoring them on release. Stored ORIGINAL disables the tool and editing controls, though treatment repair positions can still be shown against it. Before-and-after also blocks gestures while held.

Undo and bypass. Placement, an entire stroke, disabling and deletion each support ⌘Z. Click Reset Repairs in the REPAIRS header to remove all hand-placed and mapped repairs from the current treatment. This does not change other adjustments or saved dust maps. It needs no confirmation and can be undone in one step. The sidebar’s full RESET clears repairs with the rest of the recipe in one step. The REPAIRS header switch bypasses all repairs while preserving other edits. While bypassed, no edited proxy or Photos rendering is written. Pressing Q restores repairs.

Processing. Repairs are applied before other adjustments, with crop last. Later repairs sample the result of earlier ones, so overlaps follow list order. Histogram, masks, Loupe and Compare use the repaired result. Repairs remain aligned through crop and straighten.

Copying a treatment includes repairs between treatments of the same photograph. Copying to another photograph omits them and reports this. Use dust maps to transfer sensor spots across photographs.

An unsupported repair blocks saving the rendered proxy and publishing to Photos until it is disabled or deleted.

Finding dust

Press ⇧K in Develop to highlight possible sensor dust in amber. Press again to hide it. In Browse and Choose this shortcut folds sets. Focus peaking (K) and dust highlighting are mutually exclusive.

Threshold appears while find-dust is active. It persists across photographs but is not saved in the recipe. Adjusting it changes the overlay only.

Detection looks for dark patches between roughly 0.1% and 1% of the long edge. Finer texture and broader gradients are suppressed; bright patches are excluded. It works best over smooth areas such as sky.

Detailed scenes can still produce many marks. Treat the overlay as a guide and check each suggested spot against the photograph.

Changing photographs clears the marks. Other slider drags hide them temporarily. Marks follow crop and straighten geometry.

Dust maps

Save sensor spots from one photograph and apply them to selected photographs or a camera’s date range.

The row labelled The selection contains Sync spots and Apply map. The Dust maps row contains Save spots as… and Sensor spots….

• Save spots as… saves all current repairs with a name, initially the filename, and the source frame’s shape and available camera information.
• Sync spots applies current repairs without saving a named map. The source photograph is excluded. Repairs are labelled with their origin, such as from L1008804. Repeated syncs from that source use one row; repairs originating from a saved map retain its name.
• Apply map selects a saved map by name and spot count. The current photograph need not have repairs.
• Sensor spots… opens the saved-map library and is always available, including from the Library menu.

Review before applying. The sheet lists the map, photographs, spots and named repairs, plus the number of photographs receiving their first treatment. Click Put the spots on to start. The operation does not download or render photographs.

A differing known camera serial produces a red warning and count but does not block application. Unknown bodies are excluded from that count. Check that the map belongs to the intended sensor.

The selection is used exactly as shown. Folded sets include only their covers. Photographs without treatments get a new one. Photographs set to ORIGINAL with existing treatments are skipped and reported.

Orientation. Maps rotate a quarter-turn between landscape and portrait based on pixel dimensions, including source regions. The current method assumes one portrait direction. Photographs taken with the camera turned the other way need manual correction.

Existing repairs. An incoming spot is skipped if an enabled repair’s centre already falls within it. Disabled repairs do not count as coverage. Spots within the incoming map do not suppress each other. Applying the same map again restores missing spots without duplicating covered ones. The run reports placed and skipped counts.

Progress and undo. The activity row shows progress and ✕ to stop. Completed changes remain. Try again retries only failures that may succeed later. ⌘Z restores the whole run, including treatments it created, within the current session. Quitting during a run preserves completed changes; reapplying the same map avoids duplicates.

Sources for mapped repairs are found when each photograph is next rendered. Grid previews can remain out of date until then; opening Develop refreshes them.

Map rows. A map appears in REPAIRS with its name, eye, delete and chevron. The collapsed eye and V affect all its spots. Expand it to select, disable or delete individual spots. These edits affect only the photograph, not the saved map.

Sensor spots

Open Sensor spots from the Library menu or REPAIRS to browse saved maps by camera model.

Camera groups are ordered by photograph count and appear even when they have no maps. Unknown cameras have their own group. Reading serials requires original metadata access.

Map grouping derives from photographs carrying the map. An unused map appears under the unknown group until applied. Each row shows name, spot count, date span and number of photographs using it. The span starts when the map was collected and ends at the next map for that camera, or today.

Rename edits the name in place; ⏎ saves. Empty or unchanged names make no change. Remove requires confirmation and cannot be undone. Photographs already using the map retain their spots and stored map name, but the removed map cannot be applied again. Apply… opens the application sheet.

A span of one camera’s photographs

A span targets photographs from one camera model between two map dates, representing sensor cleanings.

The sheet shows dates, photograph count and how many will receive their first treatment.

With a selection, the span switch starts off and must be enabled explicitly. Without a selection, an available span is the only target and is fixed on. Unknown cameras or empty date ranges have no span option.

The camera-body warning applies to the selection and disappears for a model-based span. The same progress, cancellation and one-step undo rules apply. Span application downloads and renders nothing.