How to remove dust specks and some lens flare in post production

[Pen]

Hey, ill just start by saying im not sure if anyone else has already written a guide like this here to if they have sorry in advance. Well onto some real business. I'm sure if you do any amount of photography you've noticed annoying dark spots that start to show up in your pictures. Or maybe some nice lens flare? (or not so nice) While you can simply wipe off your lens (Heres a link to help with that How should I clean my DSLR’s lens?) and use some techniques to eliminate that annoying lens flare, (another link How to Eliminate Lens Flare) what if you already took that 'perfect shot' just to realize its covered with lens flare and dust specks???
Well heres a BASIC guide as to how you can eliminate these things. To start with I'm using Photoshop Elements 5, but from what I've seen most photo editors have these features. Here's an example image, now its not amazing or that 'perfect shot' but it is simply for demonstration.

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Now the lens flare and dust isn't severe in this shot, but I'd say pretty average. Now to start to fix this.

1. Import your picture into the photo editor of your choice (obvious but very necessary)

2. Select the spot healing brush (or something similar like retouching or etc.) and zoom in on your dust specks

3. Select a radius for the tool just a little larger than the speck your trying to remove

4. Click to apply the brush and congrats! you just removed a speck of dust!

5. Repeat until you have removed all the dust in the picture

Ok so now you got rid of your dust, but what about that lens flare? well its easy, just repeat the steps above, except with a much larger radius. (For the dust i used a 45 px radius and for the flare i used a 170 px radius) That's it, your done! heres a before and after with this technique.

From Uploaded

From Uploaded

Thanks for reading! and good luck with your processing!