Speckwell™
Dust & Speck CleanerDust off every capture, without the cloning.
Every slide, negative and print you capture brings its dust along. Speckwell finds the specks, hairs and lint and cleans them off, so you can spend your time on the pictures instead of the spot removal tool.
What Speckwell does
Speckwell looks for small places that are darker than the picture right around them (on prints, lighter ones too), by more than the film grain and the picture's own texture there. A speck in a plain sky stands out; the same mark in leaves or gravel is left alone.
In Lightroom Classic it adds a Heal spot over each mark, in Lightroom's own Remove tool, so you can move, resize or delete any of them like a spot you made yourself. Or it saves a cleaned copy of each photo beside the original. Nothing is cleaned until you choose to, and the original pixels are never changed.
It comes two ways, with one license for both: the Lightroom Classic plug-in, and the Windows & Mac app, which shows each photo with its marks circled, before and after, and needs no Lightroom.
Features
Slides, negatives and prints
Say what the captures are. Negatives are cleaned as captured, before they are turned positive; on prints Speckwell looks for light specks as well as dark ones.
Heal spots you can edit
Each mark gets a Heal spot in Lightroom's Remove tool, with its texture taken from a quiet place beside it, so the grain stays the same.
Sure marks, and the rest for you
Marks Speckwell is sure of are cleaned; fainter ones and every hair are left for you, with a Check dust keyword that never exports.
Check every mark first
The app circles each mark: green for sure, amber for unsure, blue for hairs. Click a circle to turn it on or off, and flip between Before and After.
Leaves the frame alone
The slide mount, the film's edge and sprocket holes, the board around a print and anything on black are left out. A crop from Squarewell narrows the search further.
Every run can be undone
Undo a Speckwell run takes its Heal spots back out. Cleaned copies are new files beside the originals; a second run replaces the first run's spots instead of adding more.
How it works
In Lightroom Classic
- Select the captures and choose Library > Plug-in Extras > Find dust & specks.
- Say whether they are slides, negatives or prints, and click Find dust.
- Open a photo in Develop and choose the Remove tool to see each spot.
In the app
- Choose a folder of captures, say what they are, and click Find dust & specks.
- Click a photo to see its marks circled, and turn any mark on or off.
- Click Clean. A cleaned copy of each photo is saved beside it.
Requirements
- Windows
- Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). Nothing else to install: Python and the image libraries come with it.
- Mac
- A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 13 or later: nothing else to install. An Intel Mac needs Python 3.9 or newer from python.org, plus a one-time setup the installer offers.
- Lightroom Classic
- For the plug-in only. The app needs no Lightroom, just a current web browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari or Firefox).
- Files
- Captures of slides, negatives and prints: camera raw, DNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD, PNG and HEIC. Cleaned copies of raw and HEIC photos are 16-bit TIFF.
Coming soon
Speckwell is in its final testing and isn't available yet. This page will have it as soon as it is ready.
Questions? Email info@thepictureorg.com · The -well tools available now
Questions
Will it change my photos?
No pixels of your originals are ever changed. Heal spots are saved in each photo's settings, the same place Lightroom keeps your edits, and a cleaned copy is a new file beside the original.
What about hairs and scratches?
Hairs and lint are found, but always left for you to check, because thin dark lines in the picture itself can look like hairs. Long scratches are not what Speckwell is for.
When will Speckwell be available?
Soon. It is in its final testing now. This page will have the download as soon as it is ready.
Does it work with Lightroom (the cloud version)?
No. Adobe lets plug-ins run only in Lightroom Classic. If you use the Lightroom app, use the Speckwell app on your photo folders instead.
Does it run on an Intel Mac?
Yes. An Intel Mac needs Python 3.9 or newer from python.org, plus a one-time setup the installer offers.
email info@thepictureorg.com.