Is anyone having any success with the new dust removal function in Lightroom Classic 15 ?
I’ve tried on a few DSLR shots of negs and slides, but it doesn’t seem to make much, if any, difference to the dust on the film.
I haven’t found many old DSLR photos with sensor dust, but those I’ve tried the function on seem to work better. Maybe it’s been trained for that rather than dust in general.
No, according to my tests, it doesn’t do a good job of removing dust on the film either. I suspect this hasn’t been a focus at all. The description of the feature reads:
The Dust Removal feature helps remove dust spots in a photo. This AI-powered feature automatically detects and removes dust spots created by dust on your camera’s sensor or lens.
Sensor and lens dust and spots look very different from dust on a negative, so I suspect there won’t be much overlap in usage here.
How’s AI removal performing with conversions stored as TIFF?
Maybe AI is fooled by the image being a negative…
I can give it a go, but I doubt that will do much difference. Keep in mind dust on the sensor and on the back element of a lens will look like smudgy, relatively large blobs. While dust and specks on the film surface is close to the focal plane and will appear relatively sharp and crisp. So quite different targets
depends on how narrow-minded AI we get in Lr…
I’ve seen apps struggle with negatives…and you can’t loose much time testing it with a positive.
Based on a few quick tests, I can see no difference in detection between a positive TIFF and the raw with the conversion settings.
And considering this is a tool intended to analyse the whole image area of any photo anyone might have in their catalogue, and make removals based on the results, I’d expect it to be very “narrow-minded” 
Lasersoft has a pretty effective Photoshop plug-in SRDx for removing dust and scratches (https://www.picture-plugins.com)
Quite frustrating! I didn’t see almost any removal, maybe 5% of the dirt!
The dust removal filter in Lightroom is excellent. It is not for dust you should have removed from your negative before scanning! It targets dust on the digital sensor which will be out of focus and looks much like bokeh.
If you are using Lightroom, then you likely also have access to Photoshop. In the Neural Filters there is Photo Restoration (still Beta) I’ve had good results here with dust and scratches. Don’t confuse this with the Dust and Scratches filter which is not simple to use.
Lasersoft imaging SRDx software works excellently.
..as a Lightroom plugin?
as a Photoshop plugin!
It’s sensor dust removal from a digital camera image and has nothing to do with dust on scanned negatives.