How to Use the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom (Q)

Pressing Q activates the Spot Removal tool, used for cloning or healing out dust spots, blemishes, and small unwanted elements from an image — one of the most consistently reached-for local adjustment tools across nearly any photography genre. **Heal versus Clone modes**: Spot Removal offers two underlying algorithms, toggleable within the tool's options — Heal blends the sampled source area's texture with the destination's surrounding tone and color for a more seamless result, generally the better default for organic textures like skin or sky. Clone instead copies the sampled area more directly without that blending, sometimes preferable for cleanly straight-edged or geometric areas where Heal's blending can introduce a subtle smudge. **Automatic source-point selection**: clicking on a spot with the tool active automatically suggests a nearby source area to sample from, indicated by a second circle connected by a line, and this suggested source can be dragged to a better location manually if the automatic choice picked an area that doesn't match well (a different color, unwanted texture, or another nearby flaw). **Sensor dust as the classic use case**: because sensor dust tends to appear in the same physical location across every image shot with the same uncleaned camera body, photographers dealing with visible dust spots on a shoot often find themselves applying Spot Removal to the same relative position on frame after frame — Lightroom's Sync Settings feature (copying Develop settings, including Spot Removal points, across multiple selected images) can meaningfully speed this up compared to manually spotting every image individually. **Related shortcuts**: R for the Crop tool, often used before Spot Removal since cropping can eliminate the need to spot-fix an area that ends up outside the final frame anyway. **Adjusting brush size efficiently**: the square bracket keys ([ and ]) resize the Spot Removal tool's brush diameter without needing to reach for an on-screen slider, letting you quickly match the tool's size to the spot being removed — a small spot calls for a tightly matched small brush to avoid unnecessarily blending a larger surrounding area than needed. Getting into the habit of adjusting brush size for each spot, rather than leaving it at one fixed size for an entire cleanup pass, produces noticeably cleaner results with less visible blending artifacts around each correction. **Working efficiently across a full shoot**: for shoots with heavy, consistent sensor dust, some photographers create and save a dedicated Develop preset containing just the Spot Removal points needed for that camera body's known dust pattern, then apply that preset immediately on import to every image in the shoot before any other editing begins, rather than manually placing the same spots one image at a time throughout the whole editing session. **Visualize Spots overlay**: a checkbox in the tool options panel labeled Visualize Spots temporarily converts the preview into a high-contrast edge-detection view specifically designed to reveal dust spots that are easy to miss against a busy or low-contrast background, particularly useful for skies and other large smooth-toned areas where a subtle spot can otherwise slip past a normal-contrast review pass entirely.