For face recognition, conventional dictionary learning (DL) methods have disadvantages. In the paper, we propose a novel robust, discriminative and comprehensive DL (RDCDL) model. The proposed model uses sample diversities of the same face image to make the dictionary robust. The model includes class-specific dictionary atoms and disturbance dictionary atoms, which can well represent the data from different classes. Both the dictionary and the representation coef fi cients of data on the dictionary introduce discriminative information, which improves effectively the discrimination capability of the dictionary. The proposed RDCDL is extensively evaluated on benchmark face image databases, and it shows superior performance to many state-of-the-art sparse representation and dictionary learning methods for face recognition.