Subtitles of the Movie

The Dust and Scratches Filter is useful for getting rid of those specks of dust that wind up on your camera lens, or the very fine, slight scratches that you'll find in your images, or from images that you scanned in that might be quite old and have those hairline tears in them. It's also useful in an image like this where you have a lot of wrinkles that you want to reduce. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab a regular old Marquee Tool, Lasso, and I'm going to simply draw around this region of the elephant's skin, just to show you what this tool does. It's in the Filter Menu, and it's under Noise. I'm going to choose Dust and Scratches. And it's pretty simple, actually, this tool. But the most important part is this Preview area. You definitely want this enabled so you can see the result. So I'm going to put both of these guys down here. I'm going to put Threshold down and Radius down. As you can see, as we increase the radius it blurs out what it thinks has some noise in it, so it looks at the edges and it averages them out, and it really can go quite too far. And this would look horrible unless we were making some kind of fake elephant and we had all kinds of different patches all around it to create an armored look for example. Threshold is useful for telling the tool the level or the quality of the edge detection, and as you can see I'm getting more detail back as I move the levels up in the Threshold. So what you do is use these in conjunction. You could take the Radius and start to blur out the region that you want to clean up and get rid of the dots and specks, and then you use the Threshold to bring back the detail. Let me show you another example of using it to get rid of a specific little bit of a scratch, or a little dot. If you see here on this elephant's ear, we have this little bit of a speck, actually a little hole, I think, in the ear. So I'm going to double-click on my Zoom Tool to zoom back out. I'll put a Marquee around it with the Lasso and I'm going to go back to that same filter, Dust and Scratches, and by the way just a little shortcut for you, the last used filter always winds up at the top of your list, or you can press Command or Control F. What I'm going to do now is go back to that filter and let me just go ahead and get to the actual controls. See, when you go up here usually the tools don't show up, the dialog doesn't show up. It just enables that filter and doesn't give you the option to change anything. If you want that dialog box back then you have to go back to the actual menu. So here's Dust and Scratches, but look at the difference. It's already gone. And I'll put this back down to what it was, and as you see it does a great job of just getting rid of that speck. But what I can do is get some of that ear detail back by pushing my Threshold up, and hit OK. Now if I press Command or Control D that speck is gone and no one would even know. So Dust and Scratches is very handy when you want to get rid of those little flecks, little pieces of dust, hair, and hairline fractures in your images.