Show focus point and zoom in to this point

[ChrisMatch]

Inspired by a programm that tries to find the sharpest parts of the image
to support the culling process...

Wouldn't it be great if iMatch would show the focus points for an image
and allow to easily zoom in to that point?

Well, having a wish was the easy part
but I know there is also the hard part...

This feature would be very vendor specific
and I don't know if Exif-Tool is of any help here.

I know that Nikon and its ViewNX Software can show the focus points
but I assume that there are other camera manufactures that don't even record the inital focus points.


So there is little change that Mario could implement it for nearly all cameras
BUT may it is possible to implement it for the top 3-5 manufacturers to
satisfy the need of 80% of the iMatch-Users?


So I guess whether this dream comes true depends on
- how many users vote for this feature
- how many vendors would have to be supported to be of use for a good portion of iMatch users
- whether or not Exif-Tool is of any help here
- and of course Marios final judment about the usefulness ;-)

What do you think?

[lubeda]

+1

For me is it enough to mark the focus point with an anotation.

Some cameras store their face detection marks also, this would be nice to.

[jch2103]

As you suggest, the fact that each vendor tracks focus points in different tags (if they even track it at all) would make this rather difficult. The other difficulty is that many users (including me) often use focus-and-recompose, which makes the focus point less useful.

[ChrisMatch]

Thanks jch2103 for sharing your thoughts.

Yes, this request could be extremly useful if you 'fit into the schema' but this is definitely not a feature that can please everyone.

And yes, your remark regarding the focus-and-recompose is of course something to consider but usually the new point is not that far away from the initial point -> so the 'zoom' would still catch that area in most cases - at least I hope so ;-).

[Mario]

I've looked into this in the past and all I've found was chaos...

Every vendor uses different method to store focus points (if at all). Different cameras of the same vendor record the data differently. Different firmware records the data differently. And so on. Naturally, no camera vendor documents focus points or how to interpret or show them. And I'm not really sure if this is really of interest for many. Seeing the focus points while shooting can be important if you do macro work, use shift/tilt lenses on location or similar. But after the photo has been taken...?

If your camera vendor records focus points, the data will show in the Metadata Panel in Browser layout - assuming that you have enabled import for these tags in the Tag Manager. How to find or interpret the focus points depends entirely on the camera vendor, camera model and firmware.

[jch2103]

Perhaps an enterprising user (not me!) could construct an app using Annotations keyed to the user's camera model(s) of interest? Then other users could customize for their particular model(s).

Mario - Does this sound feasible, given availablle IMatch tools (not for you to do, of course)?

[Mario]

This should be possible using a HTML5 canvas, loading the image into it and then render the points on top.

The problem is to interpret the data. Just look at everything named "focus" in the Metadata Browser for one of your files. I see there things like "selected focus point: B7" and this has to be translated, incorporated other info e.g. how the auto focus was configured, how many points, the layout etc. and then rendered.

I know a plug-in for LR (http://www.lightroomfocuspointsplugin.com/) which does this, for a whole bunch of cameras. Maybe you can ask the author how he manages it.