Did You Know? - Perhaps you didn't. | Basics of Photography | Photo Forum

Did you Know – Seeing if you have Sensor Dust using Lightroom.

Take a shot of a uniformly colored and textured surface (the sky is good) using a small aperture opening.
Import and bring to the Develop module in Lightroom.
At the top right, second icon from the left, click on the Spot Removal Tool.
At the bottom click on the check box for “visualize spots”.
Slide the slider to the right……….. Ohhhhhh Boy… look at all dem spots.

If your working on cleaning up an image now is the time to use the spot removal tool.
It’s fine to use it in this view with all the spots clearly visible.

As I mentioned in another post, most Nikon camera’s have a sensor self-cleaning function which is accessed through
the Setup Menu.  I performed the self-clean on my camera and took a similar shot as above for comparison.  
Below is the result.  Not all, but a lot of the dust spots were removed.  (The wiggly lines are clouds, not dust.)

It’s also important to note that the spots are much more noticeable when shooting at small apertures; in this case f-22.
I may one day do a test with different aperture settings, but not today.

Did you know – Lightroom Sliders too slippery?

Often in Lightroom I find controlling the amount of an adjustment by using the slider can be less than easy.
By clicking on the value number you can then increase or decrease it’s value by using the up and down arrow keys.
Holding the Shift key down will change the value by larger increments.