Got one of those "old fashioned" digital cameras that doesn't have dust removal? It's time you thought about Lightroom's instant dust-removal. That's not so much a named feature as something you can easily do by using a combination of the Spot Removal Tool, creating a Preset, and Sync-ing that Preset to your whole shoot. After all, if you've got a speck of dust on an image, it's because that spec is on your sensor. That same speck is probably going to be on several cards worth of images and always in the exact same position. You can easily remove every one of those specs on all those images...as long as you've downloaded them all to the same folder.

It's a good idea to always shoot the first image on a card on a blank piece of sky that fills the whole frame. then you'll know exactly whether there are any spots on your sensor and exactly where they are because they rarely move from frame to frame. If there's no blank sky, put a white card right in front of the lens. Don't focus, because you want to know danged well that the spot's on your sensor and not on your subject (or your computer monitor).

Load that first image, go to the Develop module (press D), and grab the Spot Removal tool from the Toolbar. All you should do is just size the tool, using the [ and ] keys to be just a little larger than the largest spot. Then just click on each spot. A pick up point will automatically appear alongside the spot. Just do this to all the spots. When you're done, check your first or test image to make sure that everything's OK.

Now, go to the Preset panel in the Develop module and click the + sign, then choose Create New Preset. You'll see a dialog that asks you to name the preset. Create a Develop Preset called Spot_Removal_080139...or whatever the date is. Then the dialog shown below appears.

When you create the preset, you might as well put in all the other settings that are peculiar camera needs, such as your Clarity and Vibrance preferences and any calibration settings you've made; or noise reduction for a particular ISO you've shot at. Why waste time doing all that later? In the dialog below, you'll see the Sync settings I choose to use. Just be sure to choose the ones that are suited to your own workflow.

After you create a preset, it appears in the User Presets folder, unless you decide to create a new folder for the preset. When you pause your cursor over the preset name, the preview changes to show you what the image looks like when the preset is applied. Click the preset name to apply it to an image. The image you see below shows the two spots I chose. You don't see these circles after you've clicked the spot tool again.

You may be wondering what will happen if you shot some of your images vertically and some horizontally. No problem. Lightroom is smarter than you think. It reads the metadata to see if the image has been rotated and puts the spots right where they should be.

Here's another shot that received the same spot retouching during the Sync process. I've turned the two dots back on so you can see where they are. Sorry, but I didn't have any vertical shots in this shoot.

When you get through, you could have more spots than were on the test shot if you’ve changed lenses, so when you get through with the first run, make a quick full-screen run-through and see if you notice any more spots. If you do, just take them off by saving the settings and then re-applying them to all the subsequent photos in the shoot.