by Michael Frye | Sep 1, 2025 | Light and Weather
Sunset light, high country, Yosemite NP, California. I made this photo on Monday evening as the sun sank into a gap in the clouds and started to light the peaks.
Subtropical regions of the world experience monsoons every summer. The most famous monsoon occurs over the Indian subcontinent. But North America also gets a monsoon. It’s a complex weather process, but a primary force is the hot summer temperatures over land, which creates a localized low-pressure area, which in turn pulls moisture from the Gulf of California (and, to a lesser extent, the eastern Pacific and Gulf of Mexico) over the deserts of northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. This monsoonal moisture brings thunderstorms to these regions, especially over higher terrain. While these thunderstorms are usually scattered widely, they can cause intense downpours over local areas, generating flash floods.
Here in central California we’re at the outer limits of the North American monsoon region. Monsoonal moisture typically reaches us for only a few brief stretches each summer, and often only generates showers and thunderstorms over higher elevations as that moisture gets pushed upward, cooling the air and causing the water vapor to condense into clouds and rain.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 25, 2025 | Digital Darkroom
Oaks and mist, Yosemite NP, California. I love the light and fog in this scene, but couldn’t avoid including a distracting wire-mesh enclosure in the composition (see below).
Thanks to everyone who joined us for my Lightroom Webinar: Advanced Retouching on Saturday. It was an engaging, fun, and, I hope, educational session, and it was great to see so many familiar names among the attendees. I appreciate all the thoughtful questions, as they helped broaden the discussion and clarify many points.
One of the things we covered on Saturday was the pros and cons of AI-powered retouching in Lightroom – and how to work around the limitations. Generative Remove in Lightroom and Camera Raw, along with Generative Fill in Photoshop, have certainly made many retouching jobs a lot easier. But one thing that many people don’t realize is that these AI-powered tools can create low-resolution results. So when you remove an object with Generative Remove, that patch, that area where you replaced the object with AI-generated content, might look softer than its surroundings. That’s probably fine for posting an image online, because no one will notice that softness at a small viewing size. But it can be a significant problem when making prints.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 17, 2025 | Digital Darkroom, Photography Tips
Dunes at sunrise in a sandstorm, Death Valley NP, California. During a dust storm, as you might expect, my sensor accumulated plenty of dust spots (see the next image below).
Removing dust spots from an image can be a tedious chore. Do you want to do that tiresome job twice? I certainly don’t – which is why I remove dust spots in Lightroom, rather than Photoshop.
There’s no way to do retouching in Photoshop in a completely flexible, non-destructive way that adapts to any further changes you make to the underlying layers. But when you remove a spot or object in Lightroom (or Camera Raw), the retouching will always adapt, no matter what you do to the image in the future. Even if you make a drastic change, like lightening the photo by two stops, making a big adjustment to the white balance, or converting it to black and white, the retouching in Lightroom will adapt and blend in seamlessly. And that means you’ll never, ever, have to do it again – which, for me, is a big advantage.
Before retouching this image you can see several dust spots, even zoomed out like this. But I found many more after zooming in, going systematically through the image, and using the Visualize Spots mode.
Removing dust spots in Lightroom can be just as fast as in Photoshop. Maybe even faster, with practice – and with some shortcuts. Here are two simple tips that can speed up spot removal in Lightroom:
Using Page Down to Move Systematically Through the Image
Starting in the upper-left corner of the photo, I hit Page Down (fn+down-arrow on a Mac laptop) to move one screen-width down and systematically search for dust spots.
Here's the next section of the image down from the upper-left corner. I can continue to hit Page Down to scroll through the entire image.
First, when you’re trying to remove dust spots, it helps to move systematically through the image to find all of them. Start by zooming in (I recommend 200% or 2:1 with modern high-res displays). Next, scroll to the upper-left corner. Use the Remove tool to eliminate spots in that upper-left corner, then hit Page Down. That will take you one screen-width down (with a little overlap). Remove all the spots in that area, hit Page Down again, and so on. When you get to the bottom of the first row, hitting Page Down again will take you to the top of the next row to the right. Keep hitting Page Down and removing spots until you get all the way to the bottom-right corner.
Wait, I don’t see a Page Down key on my Mac laptop’s keyboard! No worries: hold down the Function (fn) key on the lower-left corner of the keyboard, then tap the down-arrow key. Holding down that fn key turns the up and down arrows into Page Up and Page Down keys. (Holding down fn also turns the left-arrow key into Home, and the right-arrow key into End. When zoomed in to an image, Home takes you to the upper-left corner, and End takes you to the lower-right corner.)
Visualizing Spots
Some dust spots are hard to see, even when you’re zoomed in and looking closely. Well, they’re hard to see until you hold up your beautiful new 30×40-inch print and notice a spot you missed. Or three spots you missed. Which can lead to using a string of four-letter words.
Fortunately, Lightroom has a “Visualize Spots” function that makes it easier to find those pesky dust spots. Again, I recommend zooming in to 200%. Then, after selecting the Remove tool, click the Visualize Spots checkbox:
The Visualize Spots checkbox
Next to the checkbox is a slider to adjust the strength of this feature. The default, with the slider in the middle, is usually fine, but sometimes a stronger setting works better.
Visualize Spots creates a black-and-white overlay that makes faint dust spots jump out clearly – especially in smooth areas like sky and water. Then you can just click on those spots to remove them. (I usually prefer the Remove mode for this, without “Use generative AI” checked. But sometimes the Heal or Clone modes work better.)
Can you see the dust spot in this part of the sky? It’s awfully faint, even with this zoomed-in view – yet spots like this can become glaringly obvious in a print.
Turning on Visualize Spots makes this faint spot much more obvious (and reveals an even fainter spot.)
With textured areas, like rocks or trees, it’s often easier to see dust spots with Visualize Spots turned off. To quickly toggle between the two modes (Visualize Spots on or off), just press the A key. I know keyboard shortcuts can be hard to remember, but this one is worth learning, because if you’re like me you’ll be constantly toggling between the two modes to find those annoyingly hard-to-see dust spots.
Advanced Retouching Webinar
Of course Lightroom can do far more than remove simple dust spots. With the addition of Content-Aware and Generative AI retouching tools, Lightroom can now perform most retouching tasks – even the most complex ones. And, of course, if you do the retouching in Lightroom it’s completely flexible and non-destructive, and you’ll never have to do it again.
In my upcoming Lightroom Webinar: Advanced Retouching, I’ll show you how to stay in Lightroom to perform sophisticated retouching, streamlining your workflow and saving time by never having to repeat these tiresome retouching chores. Here are some of the things you’ll learn:
• Essential tips for using Lightroom’s Remove Tool
• Key shortcuts for making any retouching job faster and easier
• Doing retouching on top of other retouching – the secret to advanced tasks
• Shortcuts for quickly removing linear objects like jet trails and telephone wires
• How to make the most of the sophisticated Content-Aware and Generative-AI tools
Click the link below to learn more or sign up. I hope to see you there!
Lightroom Webinar: Advanced Retouching
$27
The live webinar will take place this Saturday, August 23rd, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (1:00 p.m. Eastern Time). We expect it to last 90 to 120 minutes. And if you can’t attend live, the webinar will be recorded so you can watch it later.
— Michael Frye
P.S. One more tip: before removing dust spots, clean your computer screen! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to remove a dust spot, only to realize it was a speck of dirt on my monitor.
Related Posts: The Power of Masking; Generative Remove Comes to Lightroom
Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He lives near Yosemite National Park in California, but travels extensively to photograph natural landscapes in the American West and throughout the world.
Michael uses light, weather, and design to make photographs that capture the mood of the landscape, and convey the beauty, power, and mystery of nature. His work has received numerous awards, including the North American Nature Photography Association’s 2023 award for Fine Art in Nature Photography. Michael’s photographs have appeared in publications around the world, and he’s the author and/or principal photographer of several books, including Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, and The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite.
Michael loves to share his knowledge of photography through articles, books, workshops, online courses, and his blog. He’s taught over 200 workshops focused on landscape photography, night photography, digital image processing, and printing.
by Michael Frye | Jul 27, 2025 | Advanced Techniques, Vision and Creativity
Sea stack and swirling waves, Northern California coast. 55mm, 3 seconds at f/16, ISO 200, ND filter. Timing was vitally important in making this photograph. I made 92 exposures with this exact same composition and camera settings, but only one had this zigzag wave.
Back in early June, before, during, and after our redwoods workshop in Northern California, we had many days with low fog along the coast. That’s somewhat unusual up there. It’s more typical to see the fog layer rise up a bit, where it looks like a low overcast at sea level, but if you can climb higher you might be able to get into the clouds, and into the fog.
That higher stratus deck usually works better for finding fog in redwood groves, since redwoods don’t grow at low elevations near the shore (there’s too much salt spray for them). But I love photographing low fog along the coast, with sea stacks and rock outcrops looming out of the mist. Fog is so common in these coastal areas that photographing these scenes in fog actually seems more characteristic, more typical, than photographing them on a sunny day, or even with a great sunset. I think of these shores as brooding and mysterious, so I like working with weather that enhances that mood.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 20, 2025 | Light and Weather
Mule deer doe and backlit wildflowers, Yosemite NP, California. 262mm, 1/500 sec. at f/16, ISO 1600.
It’s midsummer, which motivates Claudia and me to seek cooler and less-crowded spots in the Yosemite high country. And there are usually many flowers at those higher elevations this time of year, which gives us another incentive to go up there.
We spent a couple of afternoons recently in some colorful meadows. I loved the way the sunlight filtered through the trees next to these meadows, creating bands of light and dark through patches of flowers.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 13, 2025 | Night Photography
Star trails above a lodgepole pine, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
I think star-trail images have been somewhat neglected in recent years. Most night photographers today concentrate on capturing pinpoint stars and the Milky Way. The Milky Way is certainly beautiful, and modern digital sensors allow virtually anyone to capture the Milky Way without specialized equipment. Even phone cameras can do it. So all that is understandable.
With film you needed a star-tracker to capture the Milky Way, and it was virtually impossible to combine that Milky Way image with a stationary landscape in the foreground. But it was easy to capture star trails by just putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the shutter open for a long time. So star-trail photos became common long before Milky Way images filled up our Instagram feeds.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 11, 2025 | Announcements, Digital Darkroom
Make Your Workflow Faster and More Efficient By Mastering Lightroom’s Powerful Retouching Tools
Retouching can be a tedious chore. Even removing simple dust spots can be time-consuming, and more complex tasks take even longer. So the last thing you want is to do it over again! But unfortunately that’s always a possibility when you do retouching in Photoshop, even if you do it on a separate layer. What if you need to go back and modify the original raw file settings in Lightroom? Or what if Adobe adds a new feature for Lightroom (like a fantastic new Denoise tool) that you want to take advantage of? Now your cloning layer won’t match the new raw-file settings, and you’ll have to do the retouching over again.
But if you do the retouching in Lightroom you’ll NEVER have to do it again, because the retouching will always adapt seamlessly to any changes you make to the raw file – plus you can simplify your workflow by avoiding the roundtrip to Photoshop and back. This Lightroom-only workflow has become much easier in recent years as Adobe has added powerful new retouching tools to Lightroom, making it possible to do even complex jobs with relative ease. Because of Lightroom’s power and flexibility, I never do retouching in Photoshop anymore if I can possibly help it.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 6, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Mountains and glaciers, Antarctica
As we dive into the heat of summer, my thoughts sometimes return to the icy world of Antarctica.
People think of Antarctica as a super-cold place. But we were there in late January, which is the middle of summer down there. Most of the sea ice had melted, so there was plenty of open water, which moderated the air, and kept temperatures right around the freezing point. Not exactly balmy, but quite tolerable. I’ll take that over the summer heat here in Mariposa, where temperatures sometimes reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Of course the ice-free seas and mild temperatures don’t last long in Antarctica. In March, as the days get shorter, and temperatures drop, the sea ice starts to re-form. At Vernadsky, a Ukrainian research station on the Antarctic Peninsula that we visited during our January trip, scientists who spend the winter there have to be completely self-sufficient for six months. Ships can’t reach them because of the pack ice, and there’s no airstrip.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 29, 2025 | Light and Weather
Cascade and spring reflections, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Tennessee. I loved the repeating patterns created by the standing waves in this cascade, coupled with the vivid green reflections. 52mm, 1/3 sec. at f/16, ISO 100.
You can find every shade of green in the Smokies in spring – light green, dark green, blue-green, yellow-green, and everything in between. Occasionally the greens are mixed with a splash of blue sky or white water, but it’s a green world.
Our eyes and brains can distinguish more shades of green than any other color. The cones in our retinas, which perceive color, are more sensitive to green wavelengths than other colors – not surprising for a species that evolved in African forests, where distinguishing between shades of green helped find food and avoid predators.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 28, 2025 | Announcements
The Teton Range from Jackson Lake at sunrise, Grand Teton NP, Wyoming
I’m excited to be going back to Wyoming for another Out of Grand Teton photo conference in autumn of 2026!
I was an instructor for the first Out of Grand Teton conference last June, and it was so much fun. The Tetons are known for their spectacular mountain landscapes, and rightfully so – the scenery is amazing. But it’s also a wonderful place to photograph wildlife and intimate scenes. I think everyone in the conference enjoyed photographing all of it; I certainly did! We captured some memorable sunrises and sunsets, photographed beautiful flowers, trees, and ponds, and had memorable wildlife encounters with moose, bears, otters, a fox, and a host of other animals.
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