This free plugin shows the active focus point for your photographs in Lightroom
Jan 4, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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One of the few advantages to using your camera manufacturer’s software is that they often show which autofocus point was being used when the shot was taken. There is already a plugin which adds this capability to Lightroom, but it hasn’t been updated since 2014. So, much of the today’s camera lineup is not supported.
With the author MIA, frustrated Redditor Joshua Musselwhite (AKA Whizzle) decided to write his own from scratch. As an underwater photographer, it was valuable information for him to have. So, he felt something needed to be done to support newer bodies. Joshua’s plugin is completely free, and at the moment it supports the Nikon D7200 and D800. He’s made the entire thing open source on GitHub, though. So, anybody can add new cameras as they wish.
Initially, the only camera supported was the Nikon D7200, but D800 support was quickly added by another user on the thread. Adding your own cameras isn’t quite as straightforward as one might hope, and does require some legwork. How much legwork depends on how many AF points your camera has.
Essentially, each AF point has its own pixel location, and each of these needs to be mapped. So, the more AF points a camera has, the longer it takes to get all the information you need. Instructions on how to find the pixel locations of each of these AF points and mapping them is available in the Readme file.
Despite the low number of supported cameras, though, the plugin already seems to have proven rather popular. I can’t imagine that it’ll be too long before most of the common current models are supported. I might have to dig through my collection over the weekend and map a few to help out.
You can download the plugin over at Github, and the install instructions are very straightforward.
Have you checked out the plugin yet? Are you using one of the supported cameras? How accurate is it for you? If your camera isn’t supported, are you going to help map it and contribute to the project? Or will you just stick to using your camera manufacturer’s software to check AF points? Let us know in the comments.
[via Reddit]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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4 responses to “This free plugin shows the active focus point for your photographs in Lightroom”
would like to have this for Nikon D500!
Just spare us the time and just post a link to /r/photography already
Can he write plugin for DxO? :)))
Focus-point info can be useful in some cases, but one must be careful to distinguish what it’s showing (“which focus point was used to set focus”) from what most people are often interested in (“what did the camera focus on”). The difference lies in any camera/subject movement between focus and shutter release.