For the last few months I've been building a Mac app to clean my film scans. I wanted a quicker way to deal with dust, and I never cared for how Photoshop's Dust and Scratches filter approaches it. I tried a few other things over the years and nothing did what I wanted. So here we are.
It's called Spot Tone. It's a nod to Spotone, the old print retouching dye, but the name also says what it does.
Spot: it detects the dust on a frame and repairs it using the grain of the image you're working on, not a generic grain preset. You can mark dust by hand too, with Brush, Heal, Scratch, Clone, and the Dust Lasso.
Tone: curves, levels, color temperature, highlights and shadows, split toning. I built these for film labs so they can do their color work alongside the dust work without jumping to another app or two.
And for the labs, there's a Hot Folder. Point it at the scanner's output and Spot Tone runs on everything that lands there.
Part of why I made it is that even in 2026 with all the amazing new film digitizing products coming out (shout out to Lento and their badass product called Dock)…even with all this technology we have, some limitations are physical. As in physics. Digital ICE and infrared dust detection can work well on color, but it just plain cannot work on black and white film. Thanks Science™! But seriously, the IR light can’t go through the silver particles, so all these cool new toys can’t help. Even the Fujifilm Frontier or the various Noritsu scanners can’t do it.
So now, thanks to math I don’t even fully understand, Spot Tone can look at your scan, know what is film grain and what is dust, and repair the image with the film grain from the photo you’re working on.
I’ve tried to make the interface as familiar as possible and as keyboard-shortcut-nerd*-friendly as possible. I’m still working on pedantically exhaustive user guides and little bits and bobs for the website, but Spot Tone 1.0 is finally released after ~1000 hours of work.
Big thanks to Jared Ragland for being a day-one beta tester, and Josh Moates from Indie Film Lab for giving endless feedback and feature suggestions.
Spot Tone is $99, one time, for a single photographer. Labs run it at $50 a seat per month. It runs on Mac and there’s a 14-day free trial.
More details and examples at spottoneapp.com.