Moonrise & Aurora

Moonrise & Aurora

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Not sure if this is possible or not in Adobe Lightroom. I would like to see the focus points chosen by my Canon DSLR. I am guessing this is stored somewhere in the EXIF, but I'm not certain. I find myself looking at pictures that are a few years old, and wondering what points I was hitting.

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Funny how different bits of metadata are useful to different people. I always find it distracting to show the active focus points as I almost always focus then recompose. That's not to say it isn't useful though. :) – Mark Whitaker Nov 3 '11 at 21:08
Mark, I agree completely. This is not something I want to see very often, but when I get curious, it can be quite handy! It also is nice for a learning experience. – dpollitt Nov 3 '11 at 21:21
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FYI, PhotoME is a lightweight EXIF viewer that shows focus point (at least for my Pentax). photome.de – coneslayer Nov 5 '11 at 2:42

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In short, no, Lightroom doesn't display the active focus point(s). The only software I've used that that does is Canon's Digital Photo Professional, although apparently Aperture also does.

It seems there's a plugin under development to do just this but so far it's been developed for Mac + Nikon only.

Also, from the Adobe forums:

The focus points are in the metadata, and can be made available in Lightroom via ExifMeta. You will have to learn where AF-point "C6" lies on your photos, by comparing metadata with focus point display using your camera software, until you make a cheat sheet or memorize it.

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Aperture DOES show this. You can hover over a button on the exif panel, and it will show them all, with the active ones highlighted in red. You can also click to toggle that display. It didn't work with my ancient Olympus, but then, I didn't expect it to. Works great with newer cameras though. When they first introduced the feature, if you cropped the photo, then the focus points moved.. not as useful. I'm not sure if it still does that. – Josh Fields Nov 4 '11 at 16:32

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