Are you often wondering how cool it would be to use a great vintage lens on your modern camera? But you’re put down by the lack of autofocus?
Don’t be. There is an easy solution that makes manual focus as easy as pie. It’s called focus peaking.
What Is Focus Peaking?
Focus peaking is a camera technology that helps you focus during manual focusing. It shows a false-color overlay on the sharp areas of your image in real-time.
Until recently, it was a tool of videographers, as not many consumer cameras had it. Nowadays it’s built into most new cameras, and there are ways to enable it on older camera models as well.
How Does Focus Peaking Work?
The algorithm analyses the live image feed with little to no lag. When something is in focus, the sharp edges create a strong exposure difference in that particular area of the image.
So, focus peaking is looking for areas with high contrast, especially micro-contrast.
Then, it covers those areas with a false-color layer.
In most cameras, you can set the color of the overlay, and change the sensitivity of the detection.
focus peaking on a Panasonic GH5
How to Set Up Focus Peaking
To enable it, go to the menu of your camera. You will find it in the focus settings panel.
For the best results, set the overlay color to complement your scene. That way, it won’t blend in and you can see it clearly.
The sensitivity setting determines how much of the image is considered to be in focus. The higher you set it, the wider depth of field it will overlay.
So, use low sensitivity with wider DOF, and higher sensitivity with shallow DOF lenses.
How to Use Focus Peaking for Best Results
Focus peaking allows you to focus much quicker with manual lenses than the traditional live view magnification method.
However, with shallow depth of field, it still can be challenging to focus. You can combine the two methods to get sharpness slightly faster.
When Not to Use It
While it can be very useful, there are some cases when we don’t recommend using focus peaking.
If you’re shooting a scene with camera lenses that have an incredibly shallow depth of field (ie. a 50mm f/1.2 on full frame), don’t use it.
The area of focus can be so shallow that even the best algorithms can’t show the sharpest areas accurately. If you have that issue, use the slower, but slightly more accurate live view magnification technique for focusing your scene.
Which Cameras Have Focus Peaking?
Many MILC (Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera) models have focus peaking built-in.
Some older models from Sony, Fujifilm, and Panasonic also have focus peaking.
Some Nikon and Pentax DSLRs offer focus peaking in Live View. Canon’s EOS 90D also has MF peaking in Live View. Some other Canon DSLRs can gain focus peaking through Magic Lantern, a third-party firmware add-on.