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After shooting in JPEG for a couple of weeks on my new Nikon D5000, I quickly noticed a tiny, pixel-sized bright red spot showing up at the same place in most of pictures. This was especially noticeable when the red spot was surrounded by darker colors. At first I thought it might have had to do with a certain condition I was shooting the camera under (high ISO, certain aperture or shutter speed, etc.) but I soon realized it was happening pretty much regardless of any specific condition, so I ruled dust out as the source of the problem. I wasn’t too worried about the spots as I could easily and quickly batch-remove them in Lightroom, but it was still annoying and an extra time consuming step in my post-processing work flow. I showed my brother the following 100% zoom of a picture of Sammy to see if he had any ideas on what this might be:
He had no idea because he never saw anything like it before in any of his photos. I did some quick Googling to see if anyone else had this issue…. and low and behold I found out what my problem was: I had a stuck “hot” pixel. “Hot” pixels are dead pixels picked up by the camera’s sensor and are most likely red, green, blue or white. Already, on a brand new Nikon camera, I had a “hot” pixel! But apparently this is a rather common problem with Nikon cameras. Unfortunately the only way to remove these “hot” pixels is by pixel mapping (which requires shipping your camera to a Nikon repair center for a few weeks) or exchanging your camera (and risking getting more “hot” pixels on your replacement). What a sad choice of options. You would think Nikon would build in pixel mapping into the firmware of the camera.
However, not all is lost! I discovered that if you shoot in RAW, then “hot” pixels will automatically be “fixed” for you when you import your pictures into an application like Lightroom without having to perform any of your own spot removals. But the hot pixels are still there. The software simply automatically compensates for them via algorithms during the conversion process.
Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 8:43 amand is filed under camera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
