Lightroom becomes focus-point aware thanks to this cool, free plugin

 

 

Ever browse your photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and then find yourself wishing you could remember which focus points were active for a particular shot? Well, now you can, courtesy of a cool new plug-in from developer Chris Reimold. (And it's the best kind of cool, as well -- free cool!)

The Show Focus Points plug-in for Lightroom does just what it says on the can -- it adds a new image view shown as a popup that lets you see the locations of all your autofocus points, as well as which ones indicated a focus lock right before the shutter was released. Also shown is whether a given focus point was selected by the user, or by the camera. (For example, if the camera roamed to an adjacent point during tracking). And as if that's not enough, various EXIF info is called out including the focus distance.

 

 

Will any of the above let you go back in time and correct your focus? No, but it may help you learn to work with your camera better in the future, improving your shots over time. To take advantage of the plug-in, you'll need to be shooting with a Canon or Nikon camera for the time being, although support for other brands is planned. The plug-in works in both the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows versions of Lightroom, and can be downloaded free of charge from the LightroomFocusPointsPlugin.com website.

Like what you see? At the current time there's no way to donate to the project, but you can contact Chris via a form at the bottom of his home page to offer thanks, feedback, and to make requests.