How to CLEAN your CAMERA SENSOR SAFELY | the easy way

fantastic see you all again and welcome to another photographers toolkit thanks for all the feedback on the last one today what we're going to do is talk all about what is often thought of as really scary which is cleaning your camera sensor and I'm gonna tell you different ways that you can look at whether it needs clean in and then two different techniques for cleaning the sensor one that could just get rid of most things that you can use sort of ninety-five percent at the time and one which when you really have to using a wet cleaning method with swabs is super easy nothing to worry about so let's go and have a look [Music] so the first thing to think about is actually when you've got the lens on check in whether you've got any dust on your sensor or anything else on your sensor that you need to clean because it's going to start to impact on your photos and you don't want to have to go and be spot them all so there's a really really simple way of doing this and what I do is use my monitor take a photo of a white screen on my monitor and by doing that then you can see the dust box so I'll go through the settings to do that and show you how easy it is so first of all just get a white screen up so I'm just going to use notes here so this is a a white screen that's covering the monitor and then all I'm gonna do is have it on around about 28 millimeters switch it on have it on ISO 64 the lowest ISO anything between ISO 64 and probably three or four hundreds okay and then you want to go up to f-22 so you want to have the most depth of field to be able to actually see these spots so f-22 and if you probably use the wide-angle lens and you've tried to get everything in focus that's when you most like to see the spots in the sky so set it on f-22 iso 64 and then in manual what you're gonna do is you're gonna set the speed and look at pointing it out the screen so that the histogram is just a little bit off the right-hand side so you want it around about 10 to 15% gray really so that's okay and then I want to change the focus so it's infinity so I don't want anything to be in focus on the screen and then all I'm going to do is I'm going to take a photo of this screen and want to do that I'm going to move the camera so it seems really odd you can take a few and basically if you imagine it as you're moving the camera you're moving the dust with it so it doesn't matter that's still going to be in focus so once you're in Lightroom there's a super clever trick that my friend Rick told me about thanks a lot for that Rick and it is that you go to the clone brush here and then down at the left hand side there's this thing called visualized spots and if you click it and you can you can change the sensitivity here and you can see that if I move it right up to the top then I can see all the spots on my sensor so you know some of these are probably is going to be just spots that'll come off with the easy technique that I'm going to show you some of them are going to be more difficult to move I that one down there which looks like I don't know what so that's probably a bit of oil or something or grease and that might be a little bit more difficult to come off and that's going to need the sensor swab so once I've done that the other thing to remember in your camera that all the things at the bottom of this image at the top of the sensor and all the things at the top of the image are at the bottom of the sensor so when you're actually looking at it and you're trying to find one of those spots if there's a big one then it just inverses so just remember that as well okay so once we've done that we'll we'll take the lens off now and we can have a look at the sensor and look at a few tricks for cleaning it okay so I've got the lens off now and the sensor is is showing to you you probably don't want to take it off for that long you know the best way to protect your sensor from getting dust is when you're changing your lenses do it in a fairly dust free environment obviously you can't always do that when you're out on a shoe but try and shelter yourself from the wind and probably don't leave it off for a long time when you're doing this sort of thing but obviously I'm doing this as a demo so it's gonna be off for a bit a bit longer the other thing is I got my studio lights here which would creating some really good light onto this and that sort of side light helps me see the spots as well so that's good but you want a good good quality light on it so once I've got the lens off then I can just have a look around and see and I can see some of those dust spots already now you can if you want use a blower like this now what you don't want to do is use a blower like this because the the propellant in this the butane propane or whatever it is is is going to damage your sensor and just create loads of issues so do not use one of these on your sensor I've seen online that people have used these it's just not a good idea you better if you're going to blow any air on it using something like this and making sure that this is clean and and the way to do that is just turn your sensor up dad upside down and blow the but what I like to do before I do that is just use a sensor brush like this so this sensor brush is is specifically made it's made of nylon and what you can do is if you just get the air and just blow it like that if you can see that there I'm just blowing air on that and what that does is it creates static on this brush and then all I have to do then is just if I just brush I'm gonna do it upside down because it's just a better idea to do it upside down so you probably can't see it very well but I'm just gonna brush anything away from the sensor and I'm not too bothered about pressing on the sensor that's okay and I'll just have a look at it again and in most circumstances that removes enough dust so you can then put your lens back on we can then take another photo and here's the next photo so what we do is we go up here to the clone tool and click visualize spots and you can see these are the spots so it's a lot less if I look at one before that's the one before and that's the one now so I've reduced the number of spots on my sensor but I've still got some spots that I want to remove and especially this area here which is gonna be really troublesome now probably what I would normally do is go over with my brush again and I could reduce those down maybe a little bit further but what I'm gonna do now is show how you can clean it with the actual swabs using a wet clean so we'll go into that and then we can take another picture and have a look at how that has changed it so what I need to do is take my lens off and then we can get some swaps okay so before I get the sense of swaps out we've got the lens off here and we've done the other things now if you've got a mirror camera rather than the mirrorless camera then you're going to want to lock your mirror up and you can do that in your menu now the main thing to be careful of with the sense of thing you need to worry about is if you've got stabilization that you don't want to put too much pressure on it and because that's quite delicate now some then they might lock down but and in some cameras you can lock the stabilization to be able to clean the sensor so look at your manual and it's totally up to you you this I bear no responsibility for anybody that damages anything but yeah trust me it's it's something that lots of people do and it's really really easy to do and the other thing to remember is that on the front of the sensor then there is glass it's not like it's just not the sensor itself there's a glass protective layer on front upon the front of it and that's what you're cleaning so what you need is the sensor cleaning fluid and a sensor swab so this is a kit that I got off Amazon the lots of kicks I'll put the links to all all this in the description below so the sensor brush and the steps cleaning fluid but there's lots just get a good quality one so what you want to do is have a sensor that's for the size of your sensor so this is a full frame sensor swab if you've got a micro four-thirds or an aps-c then you need to get the appropriate one so I'm going to open that now and you've got to be super careful you don't want to touch this swab at all so I'm just going to open that and then all you need to do is put just a few drops on the end of the sensor there so I'm gonna pull one two three so once I've got those on all I'm gonna do is I'm just going to do two strokes one in this direction one in the other direction so I'm just going to go from the end of the sensor here stroke in that direction and then go back in the other direction and putting a little bit of force but not too much and it's simple as that so we'll take another photo I'll see what that looks like okay I put my lens back on cuz I didn't want to leave them at sensor I'm protected and I've just taken a photo of the white screen and I'll show you the the before and after now so this was the first image that I took then we had and this one here where we'd reduced it due to the brush in and now we've got this one after the sensor swab so you can see the still a couple of dust spots so I might give it another go I don't tend to often have to give it more than one go but I've not clean my sensor for a while now so it might need another go but you can see there's only probably one to three of any significance and it's significantly better than what it was here and I've got rid of that mark down down there on the bottom books which is the top of the sensor it's super easy to do you saw how easy it was to do it just literally takes a minute to do you shouldn't be worried about it and it can save you a lot of time afterwards in Lightroom just cloning out all those spots make your photos really clean so once again the links to the equipment that I used is down in the description I'm not sponsored by any of these so you buy whatever you want but just get a good quality one I purchased these ones because I've used them before and they've always you know been really good for me and the other thing I want to mention is that keeping your Center clean is a lot about what you do in the field as well and I'm gonna do another video in the photographers toolkit about that anyway thanks ever so much for watching I'll see you on Sunday bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 756,674

Keywords: camera, sensor, camera sensor, cleaning camera sensor, cleaning, photography, how to, how to clean your camera sensor, photography tips, nigel danson

Id: b-7ciRxh6s8

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019