Battling Sensor Dust.

[Adrian]

Hello.

ive had dust on my sensor awhile now, and i havent had much problems with it, but im just wondering how do you all deal with sensor dust, dust in your photos?

ive removed sensor dust from afew images by taking a flat frame to map the dust and subtract it from an image, thats as far as ive gone with dealing dust, when its really apperent.

otherwise ill just leave it when its not very visable, or just use the spot healing tool in photoshop to get rid of the one or two larger ones that are very obvious.

im looking for alternatives, or perhaps maybe even geting canon to clean my sensor for me.

what do you do/think?

Thanks.

Adrian.

[georgedingwall]

Hi Adrian,

If you are using Photoshop CS3, there is a neat new tool in ACR 4.1 called the "Retouch Tool".

This allows you to use a spot healing brush, or clone brush, on all the images you have open in ACR at the same time. You can then edit the positions the healing spots on each individual frame, in case the repair has caused a visible blemish on the image.

This tool makes it very easy to get rid of dust, and because you can also load jpeg and raw images into ACR 4.1, it doesn't matter which format you shoot in.

Bye for now.

[Mike B in OKlahoma]

For me, the most basic step is using a blower of some sort on a regular basis. This gets rid of perhaps 80% of the dust. There's a "Rocket Blower" product available in many camera stores that has worked well for me, I'm sure there are other equally good products. I'd be wary of using canned or compressed air.

The remaining dust will be bonded to the anti-aliasing filter in some way, and will take stronger measures. I use eclipse solution, pec pads, and a plastic spatula stick I picked up for an inflated price from a company called Copperhill. This works for me, but if you are sloppy, and perhaps if you are just unlucky, it apparently can result in scratching the anti-alias filter, which makes for a very expensive repair. I grit my teeth slightly every time I do it. For some of the newer cameras from Canon (the 5D and XTi, I believe) you need to use a different cleaning solution from Eclipse--Apparently Eclipse can damage a coating over the anti-alias filter on these cameras.

I hear some people are using LensPens to clean dust specks with good results, but I have no experience myself.

Full frame cameras seem more sensitive to this than the 1.6 crop. I rarely even needed to use a blower on my EOS D60 and EOS 10D, but my 1Ds needs to be blown off nearly every time I take it to the field, and cleaned with Eclipse every month or so (more often if I'm sloppy or it is just dusty).

[twebster]

I shoot professionally so I can't spend a whole lot of time spotting out dust in images. By the same token, I can't stop and blow off the sensor every time I change lenses, either. I use Dust-Aid on all my cameras (20D, 30D, and 1D MkII) once a week. Dust-Aid is a tacky strip that literally picks dust up off the sensor. They are attached to a special applicator and all you do is touch the special strip to the sensor in all four corners and the dust is gone. The special adhesive will not leave a residue, either.

If you haven't done a sensor clean in a very long time dust will stick tight to the anti-aliasing filter. Dust becomes almost glued to the antialiasing filter due to humidity. You'll need to perform a wet clean, as Mike outlined above, then use the Dust-Aid strips to clean your sensor periodically. This should keep your sensor clean for a long time to come.

[salden]

I use "Sensor Brush". www.visibledust.com

It works great for me.

[Adrian]

ive tried using a blower bulb, but most of the dust on my sensor seems to be that "sticky dust"

i do get that eeeek feeling about thinking of touching my sensor with an object.. its scarey stuff..

though ill probly see what i can do about my dust problem.

thanks