Fixing Hot Spots in Lightroom

In this video, photographer Anthony Morganti takes a look at how you can fix a very common issue when you have hotspots on your subject in Lightroom.

Sometimes hotspots in your images are unavoidable, you can’t always control the lighting and even if you do it is sometimes difficult to avoid especially when there are time constraints.

Removing hotspots in Lightroom however is not that difficult and there are a few ways of doing this, depending on the specific hot spot. The most basic way to remove a hotspot is to use the sport removal tool (using heal mode) and sample an area close to the hotspot and remove it – if this works it is the simplest and easiest way (just make sure you start with a brush that has about 50% feather and 100% opacity but you can reduce the opacity to really make the fix more realistic after you apply it).

If you have a more complex area, for example, one which goes over an eyebrow you might want to do the correction in parts using the same method. The first part does not touch the “problematic” area using a larger brush and the second one which does – using a smaller brush and more precise selection. You can even do a few passes like this to really nail this.

In our opinion for these types of fixes, especially the more tricky ones – Photoshop will be the more obvious choice as it has more tools to handle these types of problems – but for simple hotspots – Lightroom is perfectly capable of fixing the problem.

Morganti had already done a previous video on the topic which you can find on this video here.

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section. You can more videos of Anthony Morganti here on Lensvid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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