This soft gives amazing results. Alas, they are valid for a given light, subject distance, focal,aperture and sometimes "l'âge du capitaine"!
If you're lucky enough to have both body and lens well calibrated (meaning for a given focal, the MA doesn't vary too much with the subject distance - e.g FF at MFD and BF at infinity), then maybe this soft can help.
Nevertheless, you'll have to fight its instability (man, how many times the connection to the camera was lost by this soft), its slowness. And despite its huge number of computations, estimations, god incantations (dunno if it's the right expression in English !), this soft often gives poor results. That's a pity because you trust its results and the body's screen is not accurate to show a small misfocus... Misfocus you'll note back at home on your computer !
After spending too much time with this soft, and having too many false hopes, I ended relying on a "handmade field method" similar to Arash's one when LV focusing (meaning AF with contrast) was not possible.
Recently I've upgraded to 1Dx and only one of my lenses had a focus issue. I calibrated it using my LensAlign in less than 10 minutes and it just works ! No more required LV !
To conclude about this soft :
* the author spent too much time to implement a copy protection and too less time to integrate the functionalities with the open-source libs he uses. That's a pity since its copy protection is really poor.
* Focal on Windows (I had abandonned the idea to follow this soft, so dunno on Mac) rely on a Canon lib to dialog with the camera. There's a lack of connection stability, although it is the very lib EOS Utility uses. And the latter works well (at least it doesn't break the connection itself so many times).
* I understand the limits of software integration. But then, one has to engineer workarounds to at least reduce the inconvenience. For example, not being compelled to restart the whole procedure. Once more, a strong lack of software engineering.
* Regarding the price of the soft, I would expect at least an eval version, a faster running app (once more I could say a lot about its software architecture), the use of better libs (not talking about the Canon's one, which seems doing its work) instead of always choosing the ones at no cost.
Sorry man, but high price, high expectations !
PS: sorry for any mistakes. English is not my native language, nor my smartphone's one !
Natural light is key... Using any type of artificial light skews the results quite badly in my experience. No longer a reliable method for me to do MA.
badlydrawnboy wrote:
I've also tried a cheap Home Depot work light (aluminum dish) with an incandescent bulb in it, but that creates a hot spot on the target and doesn't seem to work well either.
I used a spot lamp and it worked well. It your target gets too hot, move it back a few inches and retry.
