De-linting a product photo

[Ultra Magnus]

I had to shoot a product for my work to display on the company website. The problem is that it has one of those soft tacky rubber coating that attracts lint like mad, and is next to impossible to remove. I washed it and did my best, drying it with my wife's blow drier, but there's still some lint. Is there an easy way, like maybe using the replace color tool, to paint all the white specs black (or dark gray). I used the spot heal tool in lightroom to get the big spots, but have a few tiny ones left.

Thanks,
BM

[GB1]

BM - Not that I personally know of, but maybe you should post the image so that we can see what you mean. The spot healer in PS is nice but like you mentioned with Lightroom's, it requires you to click on every problem area, and you don't want a big brush because that can hurt the quality.

G

[Medley]

Duplicate your background layer. Double-click the original Background layer to turn it into a "floating layer". On the background (bottom) layer, select the move tool and use the arrow keys to offset the layer. The goal here is to get the black background under as many of the lint spots from the top layer as possible. I usually go 4 or 5 pixels.

Once you have that, switch to the top layer and set the blend mode to "darken". Next, go to Layer> Layer Mask> Hide All. This should create a black layer mask on the top layer. You could also create a regular layer mask, and fill it with black to get the same effect.

Now choose a soft white brush just slightly larger than the lint spots. Working on the layer mask, click on each lint spot. You should start to see them disappear as you reveal the darken layer. Just remember to dot with the brush rather than try to paint a large area.

Chances are that you won't get rid of all the lint spots, as some lint from the bottom layer will have overlapped the lint on top, but done correctly, I'd guess you can get rid of about 70-80% of it this way.

Hope this helps,

- Joe U.

[Jaedon]

Next time try using a piece of packing tape to remove the lint. Washing it and drying it with the hair dryer increases the static on it and therefore increases the amount of lint attracted. Tape will remove it nicely and save you tons of work in post.

That being said.. the above instructions are exactly what I would do to remove it. I prefer cloning out the dust spots as I find it easier than masking and creating another layer but both ways are effective and will work equally well.

[Ultra Magnus]

Thanks a lot for the help. I'll mess around with it and see what I come up with.

On my first attempt at washing it, I dried it with a towel that promptly made it worse than before. The blow drier was a considerable improvement after that. Using tape never came to mind...

BM