Unsuccessful at removing dust spots in footage

Patrick Cooper · May 25, 2020

I know that many people use this technique for removing dust spots and other blemishes from footage but tonight was my first attempt at trying it. The workflow is pretty straight forward –

1. Extract a still image from the video
2. import still into Photoshop
3. Create a new layer
4. Paint over the offending dust spot with the background colour
5. Delete the background layer
6. Save as PNG (preserving transparency)
7. Import into the timeline of the NLE software

In my case, I used the rubber stamp tool to cover the dust spots instead of the paint brush tool. And when I completed the actions in Photoshop, it looked seamless (before I deleted the background layer.) The filled in areas blended in extremely well with the background colour.

However, when I imported the PNG still into Adobe Premiere Elements and placed it on the timeline, it was far from seamless. Quite the opposite. These filled in areas are now significantly lighter than the background colour (when viewing on the preview screen.) They actually stick out more now compared to when the dust spots were visible. A much lighter colour than before. The exported video looks the same.

Alternatively, I could use the paint brush tool in Photoshop instead of the rubber stamp but that's not going to work in all situations. I have many videos spoiled by dust spots and with some of them, the spots are partly covering clouds in the sky and sometimes appear on solid objects in the scene. So you would need the rubber stamp tool to restore the detail (and in some cases multiple colours) in that object. It's not always a case of filling in a single solid colour.

Any suggestions on how I could get a seamless look on the timeline? I submit videos to stock agencies and currently, there are a fair few videos of mine that I cannot submit because of dust spots. I really need some way of masking them successfully in post.

Patrick Cooper · May 25, 2020

One thing I could try differently is use the photo capture option in Adobe Premiere Elements to grab a still image. What I used before was one of those freeware programs that converts video to jpegs. I actually wonder if such a program changes the colours somehow. Though when I opened up one of the jpegs in Photoshop, the colours looked pretty much the same as what I saw in Premiere. Though as I noted in my previous post, the colour of the filled in areas was significantly lighter than the background when the saved image was dropped into the timeline. Really stuck out like a sore thumb.

I guess some of you are wondering why I didn't use the photo capture option in Premiere in the first place. It's an old habit of mine that's carried over from when I was using Sony Movie Studio on a regular basis. Sony Movie Studio's own photo capture tool could only grab an ultra low resolution image from the timeline so I had to explore other options if I wanted a full resolution still. I'm a fairly new user to Premiere and Ive just found out that it is indeed possible to export a full resolution jpeg directly from the timeline. I'll try that and see if that makes a difference to the masking of the dust spots.

Phil Rhodes · May 25, 2020

This can get sticky because, as you've discovered, of colour management. I'd do something like that in Premiere by inserting an After Effects composition, which will generally make a reasonable job of handling the colour situation.

Definitely export directly from Premiere. Avoid JPEG with its compression and (generally) low bit depth. Use DPX, TIFF etc.

P

Patrick Cooper · May 25, 2020

1 hour ago, Phil Rhodes said:

This can get sticky because, as you've discovered, of colour management. I'd do something like that in Premiere by inserting an After Effects composition, which will generally make a reasonable job of handling the colour situation.

I'm not an After Effects user so I'm not familiar with that software.

1 hour ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Definitely export directly from Premiere. Avoid JPEG with its compression and (generally) low bit depth. Use DPX, TIFF etc.

I was under the impression that I could export single frames from Premiere Elements but so far, I haven't been able to work out how to do that with my copy (version 13.) If it is indeed possible, I wouldn't be surprised if jpeg is the only option since Elements is a pretty basic program.

With the fully featured pro version of Premiere, I have heard people creating a duplicate video track on the timeline, cropping and shifting it sideways to hide dust spots. Though I doubt that's possible with Elements. I guess I could download a trial of the pro version and play around with that.

Phil Rhodes · May 25, 2020

You might also look at Resolve, which is a lot more affordable than Premiere and comes with an inbuilt version of Fusion.

If you were already a hardcore Premiere person it might be annoying to switch, but frankly, it's very hard to recommend anyone keeps paying the endless Adobe tax these days, especially if you'd be new to the full version of Premiere anyway.

Patrick Cooper · May 25, 2020

I know Resolve is extremely popular but unfortunately, my pc wouldn't be powerful enough to run it. Not enough RAM. Out of curiosity, how effective is Resolve at removing dust spots? I hadn't heard of Fusion before - I guess that could come in handy for such a task.

Edited May 25, 2020 by Patrick Cooper

Phil Rhodes · May 25, 2020

I think you have to give some serious thought to how much you're going to pay for Premiere and how long it'd take you to have paid for some more RAM, or even a whole new computer.

Resolve will probably do a quick mask-and-shift fix as you described, Fusion will do much more.

Patrick Cooper · May 25, 2020

Alas Ive only got 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, I can't add any more because my pc has a 32 bit system (not my choice - someone else installed that.) Though as someone pointed out on another forum, 4GB might be sufficient for the stock footage that I edit. The clips are very short (usually under a minute and some are less than 15 seconds in length.) So yea I'll definitely give Resolve a try.

Bruce Greene · May 25, 2020

If I recall, Photoshop can import video clips. I did this years ago for some simple vfx.

Check the manual to learn how to work with video in Photoshop.

I would suggest trying the healing brush to paint out the dust spots.

i also once used after effects to clean up scratches and dust in a long piece of stock footage. It took me about 3 hours to learn after effects technique and about 10 hours to repair the entire clip as there were a lot of issues with it.

Patrick Cooper · June 4, 2020

On 5/26/2020 at 4:44 AM, Bruce Greene said:

If I recall, Photoshop can import video clips. I did this years ago for some simple vfx.

I can certainly see the potential here. Not sure if my copy of CS4 would be recent enough to do this (I'll have to check.) To apply the changes to all the individual frames, I guess I'd have to do batch processing? I find batch processing pretty awkward to do in Photoshop and it doesn't always apply the changes to all the files (despite following the instructions.)

Tyler Purcell · June 5, 2020

I use Fusion to do this work in Resolve. It's extremely fast to deal with issues like this, but it's also very power hungry. I doubt highly your system would run it sadly. We have 64gb on our "modern" Ryzen 3950X build and it's slow at rendering and playing back Fusion jobs. Mind you, they're 4k and such, but still. In the past I've used a similar technique to yours, but in After Effects.