There is an
issue though: Even in it’s least sensitive setting it highlights too much. If you magnify a highlighted area you will often find that it is semi-sharp but it would have been sharper if you had used focus magnification.
Another issue is that sometimes peaking will paint your whole image red/yellow/white if there is a lot of detail like when you take pictures in a forest. This makes composition basically impossible.
I use focus peaking if I shoot quickly moving subjects were the image won’t be super sharp anyway but in general I think focus peaking is quite over hyped. It can be useful but most often it is not.
Tip 2: If you shoot raw you can set your image profile to black and white which makes the peaking more visible.
Tip 3: Top improve precision with focus peaking first try to get focus about right. Then focus a little back and forth and observe how the peaking color wanders. This will give you a better feel for the optimal focus position but it also slows operation down so you could focus magnification right away.
A third method
If you want to focus fast and precise you can take advantage of a technical shortcoming of the electronic viewfinder (EVF). The camera does not use all the sensor information to generate the live-view image but it skips lines which results in the moiré-effect which we can use to our advantage.
When there are fine structures in focus you see shimmering pixels in the EVF. Just focus your camera on some structured fabric and you should see it.
This method is more sensitive than the focus peaking and much less distracting.With this technique I usually get critically sharp images without using the focus magnifier button.
Tip 4: You can increase the effect by increasing the sharpening to +3 (
Creative Style/ your picture mode/ Sharpness). This will result in over sharpened JPGs but if you are shooting raw this won’t bother you.
