Whenever you take a close-up photo – and it does not have to be one taken with a special macro lens – try to ensure that your object is clean. That saves so much work!

Take this image (taken for my upcoming fourth e-book):

That may look fine, but if you click and look closely, you will see there is lots of dust, as well as some scratches, hair, etc.

To make it usable, here’s the dust I had to “remove” in Lightroom: one marker per bit of dust, etc, that I removed:

..which leads to this resulting final image:

And when you zoom in, you see that this one is much better.

I hope you take two things away from this. First, the obvious “clean things, especially black things, before you shoot them”. But second: what you see is not always what there was. A professional image often has a lot of work done on it before it is a professional image. There’s no such thing as “click and shoot”.

And with that thought I wish you a very happy Christmas eve day, if you celebrate Christmas; or a general purpose happy holiday if you manage to have the day or evening off and can spend it with family and friends.