Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a medical condition caused by fluctuating insulin level in the blood which causes vision loss in case of severity. Timely treatment of such risks requires identification of the first clinical symptoms like microaneurysms (MAs) and hemorrhages (HMAs). The presence of those symptoms are visible in the digital color photographs of the retina and appear as round dark red spots in the image. In this paper, two approaches in the detection of MAs and HMAs are proposed. First, the semi automated approach applies semi automated hessian-based candidate selection algorithm (SHCS) followed by thresholding to detect true MAs and HMAs. The automated approach applies automated hessian-based candidate selection algorithm (AHCS) followed by feature extraction and SVM classification that uses twenty images for training manually annotated by medical domain experts. Implementations of both the approaches have been tested on real world images from retinal scan. From the results, the detection rate of automated algorithm when compared with that of the semi automated algorithm has been found to be significantly lesser with a probability p<0.005.