Using the Rectangular Marquee and Lasso

Now that you are more sensitive about dust, take a look at the butterfly's wings. There are nice white spots on the black edges, but there are also some smaller white spots on the dark red regions -- dust again! If you use "Dust & Speckles" on any large portion of the red region of the wings, you will blur the veins on the wings. So instead, we will work with more precise selections. You may find it helpful to zoom in on the dust a bit for this work.

• Select the rectangular marquee tool from the marquee tools pull-out menu in the tool bar.
  • Depress the mouse while pointing at the upper left icon in the tool bar. The cropping tool will be displayed in this cell of the tool bar, because it was the last of the marquee tools you used.

  • After the pull-out menu appears, select the first item with the mouse.

• Position the mouse just above and to the left of a speck of dust on the wing and then depress the mouse button and drag to form a small box that encloses just a bit of the red region around the dust.

• Select the "Dust & Scratches" filter and adjust the control to remove the dust. If the marquee makes it hard to see if things are improved, select "Hide Edges" from the "Select" menu to make the marquee disappear without undoing the selection.

• Now, select the lasso tool from the tool box (left side of the second row).

• Draw a small circle around another speck of dust with the mouse to select the dust and a bit of the color around it.

At this point, the task of cleaning up specks of dust one at a time may seem a bit tedious. We can speed things up by selecting several regions at the same time and applying the filter to all of them at once.

• Find another speck of dust somewhere in the image. While holding down the "shift" key, use the rectangular marquee or the lasso to select the area around this new speck of dust. The shift key tells Photoshop that you are adding to a selection rather than making a new one. (A little plus sign is displayed next to the lasso cursor to help you realize this.) When you are finished you should see blinking marquee's around two specks of dust.

• Select the "Dust & Scratches" filter and apply it to remove both imperfections simultaneously.

• Use any of the above procedures to select and remove any other dust specks big enough to bother you.

• Zoom back to 100% if necessary. Save your work.