Back in 2014, a free Lightroom Plugin called Show Focus Points blew up online. Unfortunately, that plugin hasn’t been updated in quite some time, so if you have a newer camera you were totally out of luck… until now.
Freelance Android developer and underwater photographer Joshua Musselwhite has created a brand new, free, open source plugin for Lightroom that does exactly what Show Focus Points used to do, namely: it shows you the active focus point when you pressed the shutter. His plugin is called Focus Point Viewer, and it’s available for your downloading pleasure over at GitHub, complete with a README doc that explains how to map your own camera’s focus points and add them to the plugin (the initial download only works with the Nikon D7200, Josh’s camera).
“I shoot underwater photography. Often times the fish are moving around or I’m getting pushed by the surge, current, or any number of other things,” explains Josh on Reddit. “When reviewing my photos and editing it helps me to know if the focus point hit where I wanted it to or was I off.”
It takes “a couple of hours” to map your own camera to the plugin, but once you do it should work like a charm. Here are a few screenshots of the plugin in action, showing the focus point used in a couple of Josh’s own underwater images. As a bonus, it seems Josh has built a metadata viewer into the plugin as well:
It’s a simple tool, lacking some of the sophistication of the original Show Focus Points plugin, but since it’s Open Source you can bet some top notch developer/photographer will get their mitts on the code and turn it up to the next level.
In the meantime, us non-technical types can enjoy the basic functionality and additional info about each of our images.
