Remove sensor spots

Learn how to use Lightroom to delete dust spots in seconds

Despite your best efforts to keep your lenses and camera clean, when you swap lenses on location, tiny fragments of dirt and dust can enter your Nikon’s body and adhere to the sensor. These can then show up in photographs as small, soft, dark blobs. They are annoying because they appear in the same parts of every photo from a shoot, and are particularly noticeable in clean, smooth areas such as skies.

Your Nikon will attempt to remove sensor spots by vibrating the sensor, but this may not prove effective. For a more thorough clean you can lock up the mirror and use a blower brush to dislodge dust. Cleaning the camera’s sensor like this will save you lots of time dust-busting in Lightroom.

Even after cleaning your sensor, though, you may find that some spots are still visible. If this is the case, you can take the photo into Lightroom’s Develop module and remove the blobs with the Spot Removal tool. This samples a clean area of the photo that’s adjacent to a sensor spot; the sampled area is then transplanted over the unwanted spot to hide it.