I'll try the sensor swabs friday or saturday along with a charged brush but at this point, the copper hill pec pads added more dirt so I'm afraid I'm just making things worse. I've turned a huge annoyance into a useless sensor covered in dirt. The problem is that the pec pads are completely non-deterministic. The static charge of the sensor appears to have more pull than the dampness from the eclipse fluid.
@jzucker: this is the same my experiences, mine even worse, at first I try to erase by wet tampon , but they come back soon, as I don't want to apply anything on the sensor surface much I choose another effective solution: Try "Retouch " function on Picasa 3
( free foto organiser ), it sweeps spots very fast .
No more sensor touching.
contas wrote:
@jzucker: this is the same my experiences, mine even worse, at first I try to erase by wet tampon , but they come back soon, as I don't want to apply anything on the sensor surface much I choose another effective solution: Try "Retouch " function on Picasa 3
( free foto organiser ), it sweeps spots very fast .
No more sensor touching.
I literally have 20-30 spots now. Healing brush works part of the time but trying to do focus stacking particularly after cleaning with copperhill is a disaster. My images now have 20-30 worms going through them. No way to clean that stuff up in post processing unless you want to spend hours on every image.
jzucker wrote:
I literally have 20-30 spots now. Healing brush works part of the time but trying to do focus stacking particularly after cleaning with copperhill is a disaster. My images now have 20-30 worms going through them. No way to clean that stuff up in post processing unless you want to spend hours on every image.
It will take more than one cleaning to get your sensor spotless, and yeah, you're gonna wind up adding grit to your sensor with some passes, especially if your swabs are too wet or too dry. I usually wind up using anywhere from 4-25(!) Photosol cleaning swabs (+ Eclipse) and a whole bunch of visible dust sticky pads to get my 5D2 clean enough to shoot at 5x.
Even then, there's always some crud that I've missed. Clone it all out BEFORE you stack. I spot out a single image in ACR then synchronize all the others, output as tiffs, and stack in Zerene. Then I go back and do it all over again because I always miss at least one goober on the first pass.
obik wrote:
It will take more than one cleaning to get your sensor spotless, and yeah, you're gonna wind up adding grit to your sensor with some passes, especially if your swabs are too wet or too dry. I usually wind up using anywhere from 4-25(!) Photosol cleaning swabs (+ Eclipse) and a whole bunch of visible dust sticky pads to get my 5D2 clean enough to shoot at 5x.
Even then, there's always some crud that I've missed. Clone it all out BEFORE you stack. I spot out a single image in ACR then synchronize all the others, output as tiffs, and stack in Zerene. Then I go back and do it all over again because I always miss at least one goober on the first pass....Show more →
Which visible dust pad do you use? I couldn't find a generic "sticky pad" on their site. I do like the look of that 7x loupe. Looks like it would actually show me the dust on the sensor unlike the useless reading magnifier that copperhill sold me! I have the type 3 sensor swabs on order arriving today or tomorrow so I'm going to give it another try along with possibly the passively static charged brush.
Also, cloning it out before you stack might be ok if you've only stacked 10 images but I recently did a 60+ image stack. Also, if the clones aren't done exactly the same on each image, you will have smears introduced by zerene. One thing I discovered too is that some of the dust is not noticable (i missed cloning it) prior to stacking but once stacked, shows up as a long worm by the stacking software...
swampcat wrote:
Strange. Even more dirt.
Did you clean out the edges first? There might be more dirt stacked in the edges.
Hope you manage to clean it.
Thanks. I didn't see the video tutorials on their site but I'll have a look later today. The site is somewhat haphazard and not very well laid out. I followed the written tutorial on their site but maybe I took a wrong turn when I saw the picture of the woman with a chiwawa stuck between her butt cheeks!
one other comment about being deterministic. A deterministic system would get progressively cleaner as you increase the amount of cleaning "cycles". So far, what I am seeing with the copper hill system is that it's luck of the draw. Some cleaning cycles introduce more dirt. The fact that you need to check after each cleaning is an indication of this. To me that indicates that either the copper hill swabs are getting contaminated and/or the environment is contaminated. My suspicion is that as soon as you pull the pad out of the bag it begins attracting dust itself so you are actually rubbing dust onto your sensor and hoping the eclipse fluid attracts the dust on the sensor more strongly than the sensor does. In reality, i think the fluid acts as a carrier and transmits the dust from the swab to the sensor and that all you are really doing is pushing the dust around on the sensor with a wet broom.
jzucker wrote:
Which visible dust pad do you use? I couldn't find a generic "sticky pad" on their site. I do like the look of that 7x loupe. Looks like it would actually show me the dust on the sensor unlike the useless reading magnifier that copperhill sold me! I have the type 3 sensor swabs on order arriving today or tomorrow so I'm going to give it another try along with possibly the passively static charged brush.
Sorry, not Visible Dust, Dust-Aid. It's a little kit that comes in a red box. B&H don't carry it, but Amazon do. It's good for small dust, but not oil or large fibers (like cleaning pads will shed sometimes).
Also, avoid pre-moistened sensor swabs. They're either soaking wet or bone dry. Buy the dry ones and a bottle of eclipse.
Also, cloning it out before you stack might be ok if you've only stacked 10 images but I recently did a 60+ image stack. Also, if the clones aren't done exactly the same on each image, you will have smears introduced by zerene.
I do multi-hundred image stacks and thousand+ image stacked panoramas. It works. Spot out the dust on one image in ACR, then synchronize all the others with it. Then go back and make a second pass when you see the dreaded dust trails in the final stack.
Thanks for the tip. I don't run ACR. I just use lightroom's interface that sits above ACR. I was wondering if you could spot stuff out from lightroom but haven't spent the time to investigate yet.
mco_970 wrote:
I challenge you to a 'humidity-off'. (High desert SW here)
jzucker wrote:
25% humidity here + blowing furnace!
55% Relative Humidity here, 16c in the room, and a large open flame. It's the storage/work room tho. The rest of the house is 48% @ 21c
BTW, you do NOT need any special cleaners, pads, nor other hoku$-poku$ to do a wet cleaning.
50:50 Water and rubbing alcohol and a q-tip swab, plus a #4 natural hair paint-brush and a squeezy blower will work just fine.
Get the Q-tip moderately wet with the solution and rub it all over the sensor surface - do not apply much more pressure than the weight of the q-tip.
Wrap a lens-tish around the other end of the q-tip and lightly stroke the sensor surface till there are no streaks. Streaks ALWAYS indicate a presence of oil or some other sludge-like gunk. So if you get streaks repeat this process several times with new q-tip and lens tish.
The last step is to "sweep up" any lose particles. Apply copious amounts of your water/alcohol solution to the #4 brush (I spray it on but some in a cup would work fine here). Use the blower to blow into the brush whiskers until perfectly dry - repeat several times. Now that you have a perfectly dry, particle and oil free brush slowly pump air across the sensor surface while "sweeping" with the paint-brush.
jzucker wrote:
I was wondering if you could spot stuff out from lightroom but haven't spent the time to investigate yet.
In the developer mode, press Q for the dust spot tool.
There are some tricks that you can use to detect dust spots more easily, such as decreasing exposure and increasing contrast to extreme values. Another approach that works even better for me is to use the masking slider for sharpening while holding the alt key (option key on Mac?) -- slide it just to the threshold where big parts without detail get masked, and all dust spots will stand out. I'm sure there are more intelligent ways, but this has worked for me so far.
18% here. Pellet stove runs full time. I like how you do the sweeping step, Bif. I have a sensor brush and do something similar, but will try your method next time I have to clean.
I only had to clean my 5D2 once and the shaker has kept it clean since. 1D2n takes some ongoing work, and I do not miss cleaning the 5D once a week at all.
I haven't needed to clean the GH1 sensor at all. Just repeated ultra-wave shocks will get it every-time. But on older cameras without that feature I had to do it once every few weeks. I'm always using extension tubes, bellows, and mounting my cameras on microscopes and telescopes. And all these things are just wonderful sources of dust! Plus I always have incense or something burning. Plus plus I live in a mud-wall house - which manufactures dust like nobodies business!
I'm not sure if the sweeping is a good idea. At least in Canon DSLR bodies there tends to be some oily gunk around the borders of the sensor, so if you're going to be sweeping make sure you stay within the boundaries of the sensor.
AhamB wrote:
I'm not sure if the sweeping is a good idea. At least in Canon DSLR bodies there tends to be some oily gunk around the borders of the sensor, so if you're going to be sweeping make sure you stay within the boundaries of the sensor.
I almost always sweep mine with the air-charged brush as the final step to grab any bits of fiber or whatever... Definitely want to stay out of the oily gunk!
Bifurcator wrote:
50:50 Water and rubbing alcohol and a q-tip swab, plus a #4 natural hair paint-brush and a squeezy blower will work just fine.
I would only use distilled water (not filtered, and not tap) and pure methanol (i.e. Eclipse). Tap water leaves a residue, as does the rubbing alcohol you can buy at the grocery store--I use 99% and 91% isopropyl (depending on what they had at the store) to clean the glass plates I shoot on sometimes, and it leaves a visible streaks, no matter how careful you are.
(High desert SW here)
Plus plus I live in a mud-wall house - which manufactures dust like nobodies business!