How clean is your chip

[Tim Read]

Hi Flexers

This may fall into the category of Educating Grannies in the Art of Egg Sucking!

In the process of playing around with a Tiff in Lab to make a mask I discovered, to my horror, just how disgustingly dirty my chip was.  I had selected the Lightness channel and and was applying a curves adjustment to increase the contrast on a mid tone background by pushing the shadows up to the mid tone region when all became apparent.  Streaks, spots, incredibly small aliens from a distant galaxy (Klingons maybe). None of these marks were visible prior to the adjustment even at 100%.  I immediately whipped the back off the camera and inspected the chip with a loop and a torch (flashlight) which revealed nothing, it looked as clean as the day I bought it 4 years ago!  I then gave it a thorough clean with some Eclipse solution and polished it with a Pec Pad and to my relief all was in the back to normal.  So give it a try, shoot a mid tone and pump up the contrast in PS and scream!

regards
Tim

[H3dfan]

I had a lot of black points with light grey circles arround it. After cleaning the ir filter they just moved to an other place.
Then i used a whater based cleaner for my eye glasses and they completely dissapeared.

[Andy Johnson-Laird]

You can also make this process a bit easier by taking a shot of the sky (uniform blue or, in Oregon, uniform grey  ) with the lens stopped down to f22 or smaller. It makes the aliens reveal themselves.

Regards
Andy

[NickT]

Or better yet use a slow shutter an do a pan shot! REALLY shows up dust.

Nick-T

[Andy Johnson-Laird]

Never tried the panning approach, Nick. Do you find it works better if you stop down as far as the lens can go too? The stopping down makes the dust spots sharper rather being fuzzy Klingon blobs.


Andy
(Writing from 53 miles away from an active volcano - Mount St. Helens).