BETA

Spot Tone Dust & scratch removal for film scans — named for the retoucher's dye, built for the scan era.

Spot Tone finds dust, scratches, and fibers on your scans and heals them grain-aware — entirely on your Mac. No cloud, no uploads: an on-device model does the finding, a repair engine does the healing, and your files never leave your machine.

~~Download for Mac~~

Apple Silicon · macOS 14 or newer · notarized · updates itself (link currently disabled)

How it works

1 · Open scans Drag in files or a folder — B&W or color negatives, tintypes, Polaroids, big flatbed plates, 16-bit TIFFs.

2 · Detect One key. Dust and scratches light up in red. A Sensitivity dial sets how eager it is — obvious-only through every-speck.

3 · Fix its mistakes Brush in what it missed, erase what it got wrong. Wacom pressure supported.

4 · Heal & export Repairs match the surrounding grain. Export TIFF or JPEG — bit depth and metadata preserved. Round-trips with Lightroom, Photoshop, and Capture One.

For volume

Batch-repair whole rolls, or point the hot folder at a directory and it cleans everything that lands there — with per-frame QC previews and an anomaly gate that flags suspicious frames for a human instead of guessing.

Privacy, plainly

Everything runs on your Mac. Scans are never uploaded.
Optional contribution mode (off by default): if you opt in, the corrections you brush — downscaled crops of individual frames, never your library — are encrypted and sent to improve the model for everyone.
On first launch the app says hello once (anonymous install ID + version), and if it ever crashes it can send the crash report so bugs get fixed. Both switchable off in Settings.

Beta

Spot Tone is in active beta. It updates itself as improvements land — often weekly — and the detection model improves separately as contributed corrections are trained in. Found something odd? Use Help → Send Feedback right in the app, or write support@spottoneapp.com.