I finally got around to cleaning the sensor on my Canon 20D. This is something that I believe everyone that owns a dSLR will eventually need to do, or at least have done to their camera. I admit I was a little concerned about cleaning the sensor at first, but after a bunch of research online I decided to go for it.

It is pretty easy to figure out if your sensor need a good cleaning, just take a shot of something like a piece of white paper at f/22, if you have a bunch of dust all over the photograph you may need to clean your sensor. Double check that it is not your lens that needs cleaned, but if you take a few shots with different lens and the spots on the pictures are in the same location you most likely need to clean your lens.

Here is an example of a photo taken with a dirty sensor looks like:

Now these spots can be cleaned up in Photoshop using the healing tool, after awhile it is just best to clean your camera.

I won't bother going through all the steps, since there are great sites out there already going into way more detail then I could, such as CleaningDigitalCameras.com. I do recommend pickup up the correct cleaning supplies at your local camera store, or as I did and purchased a kit from Micro-Tools.

Here is the after shot (I still have a couple spots but much better than the first shot):