When using manual focus, it’s difficult to tell exactly where your plane of focus is. It’s possible to make a guess using your eye, but you can still be slightly off and end up with an image that is out of focus. Similar to how histograms take the guesswork out of exposure, focus peaking uses an algorithm and a simple visual aid to help take the guesswork out of manually focusing your lens.
Fujifilm is making a name for itself as a company that truly supports the cameras it puts on the market. By delivering major firmware updates for existing models (even ones that have been discontinued and replaced) they make it less likely that people will upgrade, but simultaneously build fierce customer loyalty.
Today, Fuji continues down this road with firmware 2.0 for the X-E2: a major update that brings the X-T1's nearly no-lag EVF performance and more to the older shooter.
They say that the DSLR’s better days are behind it, but it’s still the choice for most working pros. Rapid advances on point and shoots, ILCs (mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras) and smart phones have left the DSLR looking like the camera of yesteryear, so here are a few features we think every DSLR should have now.
It's always nice when a company with plenty of exciting, brand new technology continues to support their older models in a big way, and that's what Fuji did yesterday when it released version 2.0 of the X100 firmware.
If you're a owner of a Fujifilm X-Pro1 or X-E1 and have been dying to see focus peaking brought to your camera, today's your lucky day. Fujifilm has announced a new set of upcoming firmware updates for those two cameras, and focus peaking is front and center as one of the big new features introduced.
Here's a quick demonstration of what Fujifilm's new focus peaking looks like on the freshly-announced X100s and the X20. When manually focusing the lens, the feature uses white pixel highlights to indicate the high contrast areas of the scene. This is one of two new features -- the other being split image focusing -- designed to make manual focusing a much nicer experience on X-Series cameras.
Rumors are heating up regarding Fujifilm's camera announcements at CES 2013 next week. Mirrorless Rumors writes that while Olympus, Panasonic, and Sony won't have anything major to show in the way of mirrorless cameras, Fujifilm has a number of unveilings that will have some photographers salivating.
For those of you who are desperate for Olympus to release a focus peaking feature for the OM-D EM-5, did you know that there's a trick you can use for "ghetto focus peaking"?
A French photographer named Nicolas recently found that the camera's "Key Line" Art Filter actually works quite well as a focus peaking feature. Simply turn on the filter, set your camera to shoot RAW+JPEG, and focus/shoot away. You can throw away the artsy-filtered JPEG files afterward, but the RAW photographs will be precisely focused thanks to the clever "hack"!
The Olympus OM-D EM-5 is a powerful little camera, but what owners are using these days many only be a portion of what the camera is fully capable of. 43 Rumors writes that an anonymous hacker is claiming to have hacked the camera using some firmware update trickery. What he or she found was quite interesting: hidden and locked features such as clean HDMI 4:2:2 output and focus peaking!
Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.
One of the interesting technologies Sony introduced into its line of NEX mirrorless cameras last year (starting with the NEX-C3) was "focus peaking", a feature from the video recording world that highlights in-focus areas of an image to aid in manual focusing. You know those colorful pixels that image editing programs use to indicate blown out or underexposed areas of photos? It's like that, except for focus. What's awesome is that you can adjust things like focus, focal length, and aperture, and then see the depth of field adjust on your screen in real time. Check out the 10-second video above for a demo.