5 Lightroom Tools That Can Completely Transform Your Photos

From time to time, we all end up with images that should work… but don’t quite get there.

It’s often not the big things that ruin a photo — it’s the small distractions. Dust spots, people wandering into frame, reflections, or just little imperfections that pull your eye away from what matters.

The good news is, editing software has come a long way. And these days, fixing those issues is often quick and surprisingly easy.

In this post, I want to walk through five Lightroom tools I regularly use to clean up images — and in some cases, completely transform them.

1. Dust Spot Removal (Now Much Easier)

Dust spots are one of those things every photographer deals with at some point.

You can clean your sensor and check your gear before heading out, but sometimes you don’t notice them until you’re back home reviewing your images. And by then, there’s not much you can do other than fix them in post.

Lightroom’s dust removal tool has improved a lot recently.

There’s now an automatic option that does most of the work for you:

Open the Remove panel
Go to Distraction Removal → Dust
Turn on Visualise Spots to reveal everything (including the ones you didn’t notice)
Hit Apply

That’s it.

What I like about this is how it picks up even the subtle spots you’d normally miss. And if it doesn’t catch everything, you can still manually click to remove any remaining marks.

It’s one of those small improvements that saves a surprising amount of time.

2. Red Eye Correction

Red eye isn’t something I personally run into very often, but when it does happen, it’s usually in an otherwise good image.

Lightroom keeps this simple.

You’ll find it in a separate panel:

Select Red Eye Correction
Choose between Red Eye (people) or Pet Eye
Click and drag over the eye area

That’s all there is to it.

If it doesn’t quite work first time, it’s usually just a case of adjusting the size slightly and trying again.

It’s a quick fix — but one that can make a big difference, especially for portraits.

3. Removing People Automatically

Some locations are just busy.

This shot at the Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland is a good example.

It’s a great place to shoot, but you’re almost always going to have people walking through your frame.

Lightroom now has an AI-powered tool that can detect and remove people automatically:

Go to Remove → Distraction Removal → People
Let Lightroom detect the subjects
Hit Remove

In many cases, that’s enough.

It won’t always be perfect — especially with more complex scenes — but as a starting point, it’s incredibly effective.

4. Manual Removal (With or Without AI)

For anything the automatic tools miss, you can step in manually.

Inside the same Remove panel, you’ve got a few options:

Clone
Heal
Remove (with Generative AI)

If you don’t mind using AI, then the generative AI option is the most powerful of the three.

You simply brush over the area you want to remove, and Lightroom fills it in based on the surrounding scene.

A couple of things I’ve found help here:

Zooming in gives more accurate results
Trying a few variations can improve the outcome

It’s not always perfect first time, but it’s usually good enough — and far quicker than doing the same job manually in the past.

5. Reflection Removal

This is one of the newer tools in Lightroom, and it’s surprisingly powerful.

If you’ve ever shot through glass — whether in a café, museum, or even a train window — you’ll know how frustrating unwanted reflections can be.

Now, you can often fix that in a single click:

Go to Distraction Removal → Reflections
Hit Apply

Lightroom analyses the image and reduces or removes reflections.

What’s particularly useful is the slider:

You can dial the effect back if you want to keep some reflections
Or push it further to prioritise what’s behind the glass

It doesn’t always get things 100% perfect, especially in more complex areas. But even then, you can usually refine it with some local adjustments — small tweaks to dehaze, highlights, or shadows can help finish things off.

Final Thoughts

None of these tools are about “fixing bad photography”.

They’re about removing the small distractions that stop a good image from being a great one. And that’s often all it takes. A dust spot in the sky, a person in the background or a reflection you didn’t notice at the time.

Individually, they’re minor. But together, they can really affect how an image feels. The nice thing now is that fixing them doesn’t take much time at all — and in some cases, it’s just a single click.

If you’ve been overlooking any of these tools, it’s worth going back through a few older images and seeing what you can recover. You might be surprised how much potential is already there. Check out my 5 Lightroom Tools to Fix Your Photos video over on YouTube to see all demonstrations of all the tools I’ve mentioned here.