This Photoshop Plugin Removes Lint in One Click | Retouch4me AI Retouching.(2025)

A few years ago, I made a video called The Fastest Way to Remove Lint in Photoshop. It was a decent method. Uh, it worked pretty well, but it really only worked with white dust on black, but now I've actually, thanks to my friend Merrick, got a faster and much better way to do that. This is going to use one of the Retouch forme plugins, and it is called Retouch for Me Dust. I've been using the Retouch for Me plugins for about two or three year, maybe longer, for a few years.

I use the dodge and burn in the heel on almost every shoot, but this dust is going to be a gamecher. Now, this isn't a sponsored video, but I did get this plugin for free from Retouch for Me, but Heel Dodge and Burn and Fabric I paid for myself out of my own pocket, and I've been using them for years, but honestly, some of the best money that I've ever spent because of how much time it has saved me.

So, I went to the studio today and I photographed myself in my black shirt. One of the reasons I wear this denim shirt now is because my dog sheds like crazy. The denim doesn't hang on to the dog hair, but I also have dry skin and so my chin uh will shed dandruff quite a bit. So, I went to the studio today, hugged the dog before I left, and then I I took my chin and I scratched it out and got a lot of like dry skin down on my shirt.

It's not uncommon to to have dandruff and like pieces of lint on people's like shoulders, on their shirts and stuff. Everybody has dandruff. So, we're going to take a look at it uh here. And you can see there are there's quite a bit and it's very stark. A lot of a lot of dog hair. The first thing I'm going to do and and how I'm going to uh process this, I want to do this in a very non-destructive way.

So, I'm going to create a duplicate layer of the background. What I'm always going to do, uh, I'm just going to rename this first and then I'm going to convert it to a smart object. And that's so that once I apply a filter to it, I can go back and change the filter later. So I'll select the filter, go down to the retouch for me, and I'm going to click on dust. And then the it's going to open the filter.

There are three different settings here. One is coarse dirt, one is medium dirt, and one is fine dirt. They all scan the image and take a while to rebuild a profile. Because this is fine dirt, I'm going to want to click on find dirt. And I'm going to let that do its thing. And we're going to jump to the end when it is done because on some images it takes almost 2 [Music] minutes. Okay. A couple minutes and a handful of Doritos later.

You can see the difference is incredible. And if we just tap the space bar, you can see a before and after. If I had to do that by hand, that would take maybe 20 minutes, half an hour. I want to show you what else is happening here in the photo and what else it's touched. So, you can see it's addressed some of the hair in my beard. These these white standouts and hair that's in and along the hairline that's mixed in here, the corners of my eyes as well.

Some black spots here in the glasses. It's got some of the the dry skin up here uh on my forehead. But what I'm going to do is you have an option down here to make this a mask or not make it a mask. If you make it a mask, you can't really go back in and make adjustments afterwards because it will convert the layer into just the pixels here that have been changed and then you won't be able to come back and make adjustments.

So my advice is do not make a mask. Click apply. And then we have the layer here. And then the smart filter is here. That's why we made it a smart object. So if I wanted to go back, I could just double click on the filter and go back in and make an adjustment. I'm going to cancel that here. Now we have that on a separate layer. And that's only taken a few minutes. And if I just turn that on or off, you can see how that's applied on that layer.

By default here, I'm going to apply a mask to this layer and then tuck it into a group. This is just a a habit of mine so that I can keep my changes separate and and isolated from one another. Yeah, I don't know that it can get much faster than this. This is definitely the fastest way to get rid of lint. I'm going to be using this now on on every image and it is already in my workflow. Now, my friend Merrick, who is the person who turned me on to the dust plugin, also sent over this image.

I've already made a duplicate layer here and converted it to a smart object. So, let's load up the filter. I'm using the medium dirt setting here. So, I've I've tested this image already. Coarse dirt took about 12 seconds to analyze the image. The medium dirt took about 32 seconds to analyze the image. And the fine dirt took a minute and 57 seconds to analyze the image. So now that we have the medium dirt having analyzed the image, if we look at this table, this is the result.

And if I press the space bar, you can see the before and the after, the before and the after. And then we can also take a look at what's happening elsewhere in the image. You can see some of the hardware used to assemble this credenza uh have disappeared. But also some things are going on here that we don't want to have happen. This is a product photo of this stereo system lifestyle image here in the window.

We're getting a lot of uh fixes that I would probably actually leave in. Cleaning up some of the wall, the brick on the wall. I actually like that how that looks. So, I would leave those in. I like these changes. I'm going to hit apply. I'm not going to apply it as a mask again. But again, with the layer we're going to apply a mask, I'm going to use a black brush. I'm going to mask out the areas that I want to keep.

I don't want it making adjustments to certain sections of the image. I want to make sure the equipment isn't being touched. I'm sure I could probably use an AI object selector to mask that out as well. This plugin is uh phenomenal and uh I really like it. I'm going to go back to this photo of me and I've created uh some actions for the different plugins. So now what I can do is I can just click on the dust and lint setting I have.

Hit play. Give it a couple minutes cuz that plugin is going to take some time. All right. And so there's our result. We have gone from this to this just with one single button on that action. The lint on that is gone. I've created an action because I want to be able to batch process images like this. So if I go up to file automate batch, I'm going to use this dust and lint. So, going into my folder, going to select save and close.

And then I'm just going to hit okay. And it is going to take every image that's in that folder, and it is going to go through the process of applying that action to every image. If you want to get a copy of these actions, these retouch for me actions that I've built out. I'll put a link in the description below where you can get them. I'm going to give them to you for free. So, you can just grab them and drop them into Photoshop.

Oh, just open your actions panel, click on the hamburger menu, and then click load actions. Select them from where they are on your computer, and you can load those actions up. The way I've designed these actions is so that they will work whether or not you have a layer selected, no layer selected, or if you have a bunch of different layers, and your layers down here. Doesn't matter where you are in your layer stack, they will all work and they will put a new layer at the top of the layer stack. and everything will be non-destructive so that you don't have to worry about it affecting your image at all.

I have five actions currently. I have one for the heal tool, one for the dodge and burn tool, one for the dust and lint, the dust uh plugin, and one for the fabric plugin, and then I have a fifth action which basically will apply the heel, then dodge and burn, then the dust, and then the fabric all in one go. Put it all in one folder, nice and grouped in your layer stack. And again, because it's non-destructive, you can change the opacity of the layer.

You can make adjustments, mask out areas, get a lot of your retouching done very quickly in what in my opinion is a very high level. I used to do a lot of this work by hand. Having these plugins has saved me, I would say hours, but I think at this point it's probably weeks, if not months of time. So, I'm going to put a link below for the plugins, and I'm going to put a link below for the actions. In order to use the actions, you do have to own the plugins.

I highly recommend them. And they're also going to offer you a 20% discount on the plugins or subscription. They have cloud-based uh retouching. I prefer to have the plugins on my computer in case there's uh an internet outage. I can still get my work done. I don't need to send things up to the cloud. Just a quick note here. When you download the plugin and go to install it, depending on the security settings on your computer, mine are pretty tight.

When you go to install the software, you might get a warning window like this. All you have to do is click on the words more info here. A box should pop up beside where it says don't run. Just click on that. It will install no problem. If you want to see the old way that I used to do this, you can watch this video right here. But it does not do anywhere near as good of a job as this does. And it actually uses dust and scratches and trying to like fix things that way that can can leave some remnants uh on your work.

But this does not leave remnants as you've seen.