Purple spots appearing in every photo from my Nikon D5000 — what are they?

Question

I’m seeing small purple spots in all of my recent photos, including images shot with a Nikon D5000 and Sigma 10-20mm lens. They appear in the same places from shot to shot, and I made them easier to see by increasing contrast in Lightroom. What causes this, and is there a way to fix it in-camera or in post-processing?

user67 · Accepted Answer

These are probably the result of defective pixels on the image sensor, and are commonly referred to as "stuck", "dead", or "hot" pixels.

This is a common occurrence with image sensors. There are several ways to deal with this problem:

Replace the camera - this is probably the most expensive solution
Replace the sensor - this may be as or more expensive than replacing the camera
Sensor pixel mapping - this is often an option that can be used to avoid changing the hardware. If you send your camera in for support, the technicians can tell the software to ignore the dead pixels.
Software mapping - there are different software tools that can be used to ignore dead pixels, but usually these work best if shooting RAW.
fixing them by hand - this is time consuming, but you can just hand edit your images

Purple spots appearing in every photo from my Nikon D5000 — what are they?

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