Most of the time, I use either Lightroom’s cloning tool for dealing with dust on the sensor. If I want more control, I use the Photoshop clone stamp tool. But neither does a good job with smooth gradients.
Yesterday I was editing this image:
There were some dust spots in the sky. Because of the f-stop (f/8), the great distance between the top of the GFX sensor stack and the sensor itself, they were large and diffuse. Neither Lr’s nor Ps’s cloning tools worked well. So I tried Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool.
It worked great. Give this a try, folks.
Thanks, Jim. Yes, these different tools work in different contexts, and you bring up a good point here with the CAF tool. I’m reluctantly doing more work with PS out of necessity—thankfully it’s easy to move back and forth from Lightroom.
from my experience doing a lot of retouching the affinity photo repair / healing tools are much better than their PS counterparts, far lesser artefacts and more natural results worth a try.