From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

Dust removal in the camera

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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Dust removal in the camera

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- Even if your extremely careful when changing lens out in the field you're likely to get some degree of dust and other blemishes on the image sensor in your camera from time to time and that means that you either want to have the sensor cleaned by a professional or use swabs and solution to clean the sensor yourself. But what about in situations where you simply can't? Maybe you're out without any swabs, without the tools you need to clean the sensor or you're otherwise just unable to clean the sensor in that current situation? Well actually the camera itself, very often many newer cameras include a sensor cleaning built right it. It uses vibration mode that essentially shakes dust right off the sensor. But for more stubborn problems, some cameras even have the ability to essentially map out the dust that's on the sensor and then use software to remove that dust. It's actually rather magical and it's very easy to use. So I happen to be using a Canon 7D Mark 2 camera which is one of the models that does support this feature. And the first thing is to essentially capture a reference image that shows the dust. And so we just need to photograph a blank object. So a blank sheet of paper works perfectly well. I'll just use my laptop here as a stand. And then on the camera's menu, I'll need to choose the option for dust delete data. In other words, I want to record the data in order to remove the dust from the photos later. So I'll go ahead and choose that option and choose OK. It performs a quick a sensor cleaning just to try to make sure that any residual dust is removed. And then what I need to do is point the camera at my white object, at the white sheet of paper here and then essentially capture an image. And this will take just a few seconds. It's not actually capturing an image, but it's capturing the dust delete data. And then once I've captured that information, that is embedded in each photo that I capture from that point forward. And then I can download those photos onto my computer, and use special software. In this case since it's a Canon camera, I would need to use Canon's Digital Photo Professional software in order to process the photos and remove blemishes based on that data. So let's take a look at a couple of sample captures. This first photo was captured before I recorded the dust delete data and so if I choose the command to apply that dust delete data, I'll receive an error message that there is no such data embedded in this photo. I cannot apply that removal. So I'll go ahead and close this image and move on to an image captured after that data was gathered. Notice that there are dust spots that we can see in this image. This is just a reference image of that same white sheet of paper I used to capture the data for my dust removal. I'll go up to the menu here and choose Adjustment followed by Apply Dust Delete Data and now the image will be processed and in just a moment here you'll see that those dust spots that are very obvious here are going to magically disappear. And so you can see, those dust spots disappear. There are a couple of very minor spots that appear to have remained in the photo. So certainly this technology is not perfect, but it does do a very good job in many cases of automatically removing blemishes in the photos based on where dust or other contaminants actually exist on the image sensor. So if you're camera is so equipped and you're not prepared to clean the sensor out in the field, for example, you might take advantage of that option to automatically remove dust spots from your photos.

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