There must be a lot of friends who travel with their cameras. After a round of traveling, besides remembering to export and backup photos, another thing you must pay attention to is the cleaning of your camera. In this article, we will talk about how to clean your camera from the outside to the inside, to minimize the damage and hidden danger caused by dust and stains.
Basic Preparation
For a complete camera cleaning, here are the things you need to buy in advance:
leather blow dryer
a soft bristle brush
Lens cleaning cloth (or lens paper) and cleaning solution, or lens-specific wipes
Sensor cleaning rod
Such products on the market has been very rich and mature, when buying pay attention to choose their own familiar or have heard of the big brands can, pay attention to do not want to be cheap, although the skin blow, brush and other products is not much technical difficulty, but the workmanship and materials will still affect the experience. Some brands will provide the above cleaning tools set, a set of quality products should be priced at more than a hundred dollars. Although it is not absolutely ‘expensive is good’, the base should not be too low.
In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate on their uses and usage respectively. Before you start, you just need to remember that the overall order of camera cleaning is “blow first and wipe later”, that is, first blow off the floating dust on the body or lens, and then wipe and so on. The advantage of doing so is that it can prevent direct wiping leading to dust abrasion of the lens or key parts, and it can also avoid the trouble of the cleaner the more the cleaning cloth gets dirty.
Camera Body Cleaning
The body part of the camera is exposed on a daily basis and can easily get all kinds of oils, dust, hairs, and so on. However, just like wiping the screen of your cell phone, cleaning the camera body is very simple and not that difficult.
The most practical cleaning tool is a leather blow dryer. Cameras have many crevices that tend to accumulate dust, and the area around the lens mount tends to be the worst area for dust accumulation, which can be blown away using a skin blow. Most of the time, blowing through the body with a leather blow dryer is enough to keep the camera clean.
If there is relatively stubborn dust buildup on the body, or if the machine itself has not been cleaned in a long time, you can use a soft brush to brush the dust off. As long as you are not aiming the brush directly at the viewfinder, lens, LCD screen and other relatively delicate parts, you can feel free to clean all other locations.
In addition, the body can also be wiped with a cleaning cloth with a screen cleaning solution to remove oils and so on. It should be noted that it is prudent to use alcohol to wipe the camera body, because many cameras use leather materials on the body, and alcohol can directly damage the leather. In addition, the cleaning fluid should not be sprayed directly onto the camera body as much as possible, but rather sprayed onto a cleaning cloth and then wiped to avoid the liquid seeping into the camera through the cracks.
Lens Cleaning
The lens is usually the most expensive ‘accessory’ of a camera and needs to be well protected. Generally speaking, there is not much difference between cleaning the lens and the camera body, the focus is on avoiding scratches during the cleaning process.
The main tool for cleaning the lens is still the leather blowing, most of the time, the leather blowing can effectively blow away the dust around the lens. If the gray stains are relatively stubborn, you can use a special lens cleaning cloth, or lens cleaning wipes that have become very popular in recent years. When buying such products, you need to pay attention to whether the product description clearly states that “you can wipe the camera lens” to avoid damage to the lens coating.
Also popular on the market in recent years is a lens pen, which usually has a brush on one end and a suction cup-like carbon tip on the other. This carbon tip works similarly to a cleaning cloth and is mainly used to remove stains from the mirror. If you already have a brush and a cleaning cloth respectively, it’s okay not to buy a lens pen without following the trend or being fooled by the manufacturer. Lens filters are also cleaned in a similar way to lenses and will not be repeated here.
Sensor Cleaning
Sensor cleaning is theoretically the more difficult part of camera cleaning. Although today’s cameras are getting better and better, and waterproof and dustproof performance is becoming more and more popular, it is still inevitable that dust will fall into the sensor in various environments. The sensor is precisely the most valuable component in the camera, and cleaning it up requires not only care and attention, but also the use of the right tools.
Preliminary check: How to check if the sensor is dirty?
Sensor dust is usually indistinguishable to the naked eye, in other words, even if you remove the lens and look at the sensor for half a day, it’s still difficult to determine whether it’s really dirty. A quicker and easier way is to face the sky, set your aperture to below f11 (or as low as it will go), set your focus point to infinity, and take a picture of the sky. Afterwards, check the photo to see if there are any obvious small black dots in the picture, if so, the sensor is dirty and needs to be cleaned. If there are, the sensor is dirty and needs to be cleaned. On the other hand, the sensor is in a good state of cleanliness, so you can omit the following steps as appropriate.
Advanced troubleshooting: a more rigorous troubleshooting process
After determining that the sensor is dirty and needs to be cleaned, the next step is to be more rigorous in determining how dirty the sensor is.
Find a piece of white paper, a white wall, or turn on a plain white image with your computer monitor full screen. Set your camera’s aperture to below f11 (or the smallest), focus to infinity, adjust the ISO to 200, and take a picture of the plain white image. Then import the photo into Adobe Lightroom on your computer and check that the black dots in the image are where the smudges on the sensor are. The more black dots, the dirtier the sensor.
In order to show the location of the smudges more clearly, you can also use Lightroom’s Visualize spot feature, which works by selecting the Smudge tool in Lightroom, finding the “Show Smudges” button and clicking on it. At this point, the image will turn black and white, and all the dirty spots on a pure white background will be highlighted.
Some cameras also come with a dust detection function, after taking a picture against a white background, the camera will automatically generate a map of the location of the dirty spots, which is equivalent to automatically completing the process of importing the above into the computer in-camera. If your camera has the function can be utilized, can save a lot of time to save and process the picture.
The above steps are just to confirm the degree of soiling of the sensor, you don’t need to deliberately memorize the location of the stains, because in the next cleaning steps, we will adopt the mode of undifferentiated cleaning regardless of the degree of soiling of the sensor and the distribution of the stains.
Cleaning the sensor
Cleaning the camera sensor requires the use of the camera sensor cleaning rod mentioned above, which can be bought on e-commerce platforms by searching for relevant keywords. For common camera formats on the market, such as medium format, full frame, APS-C, M 4/3, etc., there are basically corresponding sizes of cleaning rods, so you should choose according to your own camera and don’t buy the wrong one. I have also searched for some cooler formats (e.g. APS-H), and the match is much worse. If you are using this type of camera, you can buy a cleaning rod that is smaller than the size of your camera’s format, and then clean it more often when you clean it.
Camera cleaning wands have a spatula shaped cleaning tip wrapped around a sensor cleaning cloth and usually come with a bottle of cleaning fluid.
The process for cleaning the sensor is:
Use a tool such as a leather blow dryer to clean the outside of the camera, especially near the lens mount, to avoid dust falling into the sensor and causing secondary contamination.
Power on the camera and find “Clean Mode” in the settings menu and turn it on. If you are using a DSLR camera, the camera will usually automatically raise the reflector to expose the sensor in cleaning mode. If your camera has mechanical stabilization, cleaning mode will also turn the stabilization off and fix the sensor position to avoid shaking during cleaning. Mirrorless cameras, on the other hand, open the shutter curtain in this mode, again exposing the sensor.
With the sensor facing toward or under the table, clean it with a skin-blower, again preventing floating dust from falling off.
Lower the camera. Remove one of the camera cleaning wands and apply a few drops of cleaning solution to the cleaning cloth as instructed in the instructions (usually 1 to 3 drops) and wait a few seconds to allow the cleaning solution to fully saturate the cloth.
Use one side of the cleaning rod to gently brush over the sensor from left to right, and then reverse the process and brush back with the other side. If your sensor is dirty, remove a new cleaning rod and repeat the above action once more.
Snap the lens back into the snap and the cleaning is complete.
Once cleaned, you will need to repeat the troubleshooting process mentioned above to check the sensor again for any more dirt, and if it is not cleaned, repeat the steps above until the sensor is completely free of dirt.
Addendum: How to fix smudges in photos
Often times, you don’t notice a smudge on your sensor, but the photo has already been taken. When you return home after a trip, you realize that there are black smudges in the photos, and you can’t help regretting that you didn’t clean the camera before taking the photos, and worrying about what to do with the photos you’ve already taken.
If this really happened, do not worry, most of the picture post-processing tools have been equipped with a relatively perfect stain repair function, can help you to restore the loss. I will continue to use Adobe Lightroom as an example to demonstrate the process of removing smudges.
Go to Lr, open a photo, go to edit mode and select Healing Brush.
Select Heal in Healing Mode, your mouse pointer will turn into a circle, click on the picture and the smudge in the corresponding position will be removed automatically.
By clicking the “Show Stains” button, the picture will be highlighted and the stains will appear as white dots in the picture.
In addition to stains, birds in the sky and certain picture elements may also appear as white spots, so remove them in combination with the original picture. Additionally, you can adjust the Threshold slider to increase or decrease the intensity of the displayed stains, which in turn provides flexibility in determining what is a stain and what details need to be preserved.
One more thing: you usually don’t need to remove smudges in buildings or subjects, because they are not visible in the actual image, and removing them may cause the corresponding area to look strange. Some smudges can only be seen in “Show Smudges” mode, and it is up to you to decide whether to remove them or not.
This is the end of stain removal for a photo. But if you’re traveling and take thousands of photos at a time, it’s a lot of work to fix them one by one. The good thing is that the location of the smudges is usually the same for photos taken at the same time, so you can use Lr’s photo batch processing feature to fix the smudges in batch, as follows:
After a photo has been decontaminated, select “Choose Edit Settings to Copy” in the toolbar.
Clear all the checked settings first, and then check “Repair” individually. Next, you can paste the setting in all the pictures that need to be repaired.
One more thing to note: although this batch process saves time and effort, not every fixed position in the photo needs to be repaired stains, as mentioned above, the part of the photo that has content usually does not need to be repaired, so after the batch process should also remember to comb through it again to check for mistakes.
If you’re using Capture One, the process of removing stains is slightly different, but the overall idea is similar, and the process is:
Open C1, load the photo, and select the Exposure editing interface.
Create a new Filled Layer.
In the Levels Adjustment Panel, center the bottom dials of the Highlights and Shadows sections. The purpose of this step is to increase the contrast of the image so that the smudges in the highlights will show up.
Select the original layer and turn on the Smudge Removal tool to clean up the smudges in the image.
Once cleaned up, turn off the Fill Layer and the color of the image is restored and the smudges are cleaned up.
The most important thing to keep in mind when cleaning your camera is that you should not use compressed air to blow the dust out, always use a skin blow. The problem with compressed air is that, one, if the pressure in the bottle is too high and the temperature too low, the cold air coming out can condense the water in the air and spray it onto the body parts, creating an additional cleaning burden, and, two, the overly-cold air itself can cause the sensor to freeze and crack, damaging the camera. I’ve been very reckless in blowing compressed air over a sensor and ended up blowing a pile of icy slush all over a Leica sensor, and the heartache index is not hard to imagine. The pockets of dust you see above on the sensor are the aftermath of messing around with compressed air.
In addition, if you are using a film camera, you need to pay attention to the aging and corrosion of certain mechanical parts, such as the camera back cover of the shade of the cotton will fall off after aging, and need to be replaced in a timely manner. Part of the old camera will also appear lens mold, yellow spot defocus and other problems, you can find a professional camera repair station to solve.