Canon R5 Circular Spots in my Photos

[JohnFr]

Yesterday while doing post processing of a large gigapixel panoramic photo derived from about 495 photos (9 rows x 55 col) I noticed that about 1% of the individual photos had a curious perfectly round blurry spot in the photo. These photos were taken with my R5 and a Canon 100-400mm f/5.6-6.3 zoom lens @300mm.

At first I though it was a flaw caused by the stitching software (PTGui). But then I opened several of the photos with the spot in Camera RAW to see if the spots were in the original RAW photos. What I found was that in the photos with the spot it was always located in the same area of the photo. (See 2nd image.) I first thought it was a lens flare but because each photo was taken with a different orientation using the panoramic nodal head, related to the sun a lens flare should move from shot to shot.

I am at a loss to explain what is causing this blurry spot. It is perfectly round with sharp crisp edges. Most of the time it isn't a perfect full circle. There will be a section of the circle that is in focus.

Has anyone experienced this phenomenon?

 

[Ferenc MÓGOR]

Yesterday while doing post processing of a large gigapixel panoramic photo derived from about 495 photos (9 rows x 55 col) I noticed that about 1% of the individual photos had a curious perfectly round blurry spot in the photo. These photos were taken with my R5 and a Canon 100-400mm f/5.6-6.3 zoom lens @300mm.

At first I though it was a flaw caused by the stitching software (PTGui). But then I opened several of the photos with the spot in Camera RAW to see if the spots were in the original RAW photos. What I found was that in the photos with the spot it was always located in the same area of the photo. (See 2nd image.) I first thought it was a lens flare but because each photo was taken with a different orientation using the panoramic nodal head, related to the sun a lens flare should move from shot to shot.

I am at a loss to explain what is causing this blurry spot. It is perfectly round with sharp crisp edges. Most of the time it isn't a perfect full circle. There will be a section of the circle that is in focus.

Has anyone experienced this phenomenon?

View attachment 32924

View attachment 32925

Could it be a water droplet or condensation? If you're shooting in humid or wet conditions, droplets or condensation on the lens can cause circular spots.

 

[JohnFr]

Mystery Solved

OK, after quite a bit of digging I have determined the cause. It is not a camera issue. Apparently I introduced this while pre-processing the image set in Adobe Camera RAW. Deleting the .xmp file for this image removed the spot.

When I went to process these images I discovered that I had a significant dust spot. In Camera RAW I used the REMOVE tool to delete the dust spot on an image with lots of sky. (It has been my understanding that versions of Camera RAW since about Aug. 2024 functioned virtually the same as the "Content Aware Spot Removal" in Photoshop.)

I then did a Select A - Sync with the Remove check box checked to remove this dust spot from all of the images in the panoramic set. Apparently this function doesn't work in some situations. 99% of the images in the set look perfectly fine. For the 1% it appears that the "Content Aware Spot Removal" in Camera RAW isn't as aware as it needs to be.