Manufactures of cameras and lenses make their equipment to fall into certain quality control standards. But that may not be good enough sometimes. I have created a DIY lens aligning setup, and from what I can tell it works great.
Items you need:
Cereal box (needs to be at least as big as an 8.5 x ll piece of paper on one side)
Good Quality scissors
a focusing box (made in photoshop)
a focus ruler (made in photoshop)
black tape
High quality printer (laser or inkjet)
8.5 x 11 Sheet of paper (x2)
First I made a focusing box, the idea here was to make multiple points to focus on and so I could use different lenses at different focal lengths without having to make different sizes focusing boxes, Its really simple to layout in photoshop, just use many guides and grids that way everything lines up correctly.
here is what I made
Next I made the focus ruler, This was really simple also, I started off with a box that was 5px in height (length doesnt matter) then I just kept duplicating the height until I took up half of a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. So the height scale went from 5px to 10px, to 20,px to 40px and so on. I used guides to help me out with aligning them all in the center. after that I just duplicated the box all the way up and down the paper and I did that for each row. I put numbers in to make it easier to tell what was in focus, and make sure to use really sharp text and really sharp boxes to make it easier to tell what is in focus.
Here is what I made
*Disclaimer: Now these things in photoshop that I made have really no accurate measurements to the camera settings. I just made it so I could you trial and error to micro align my lenses.
after I finished the focusing box and focusing ruler I printed them out on separate pieces of paper, but what I would do before hand is make guides for cutting the focusing ruler, I didn’t do this so it made it hard to cut it out in strait lines. (or if you have a strait cutter use that)
I took my cutouts and traced them onto the cardboard cereal box. The cereal box is to make the focusing box and ruler sturdy and to make a stand for both, this is just one way of doing it and it was the least costly for me. After I traced them out I added about a quarter of an inch on each side of the focusing box. The focus ruler I made the same size as my cut out.
After I cut out the focus ruler backing I covered it in black tape so that the writing from the box wouldn’t show through. After I did that taped the ruler to the backing. (if I were to do it again I would probably glue it.)
The backing for the focusing box is also the stand to hold both up so when I was taking pictures it would hold itself up. So the cutout for the focusing box is a much different shape.
like this. The reason why it is this shape is so that when the focusing box is mounted, and when the focus ruler is you can line up the centers together on different planes.
Here is the layout
To make this stand up by itself I made supports on the back by cutting thin strips of cardboard, folding them in half and taping them to make a triangle this makes it rigid enough to hold eveything up. To make the stand I just made a bigger triangle, but with this I needed to align it to the bottom so the whole thing would stand up strait. Here is the back of my stand.
Notice I do not have the big triangle part on the back thats because I wanted to put it on after I covered it with black tape, that way it would be removable so the whole thing could collapse.
After I covered the stand with black tape I mounted the focusing box and the focus ruler on to my stand. The Tricky part was to get the focus ruler on strait and inline with the focus box. I used to pieces of tape on the back side of the ruler to hold and balance on the cutout for it. Once it is all done it should look like this.
The lens I tested to see if it would work well is my canon 50mm f1.4, To test I set my aperture to wide open (f1.4) this is what made sense to me because it everything would be out of focus except for the exact point to which you want to be the sharpest, which should be the center focusing point. I focused on the middle right box of my focusing box and did all my focusing from that point on. My first picture is the one above and by looking closely you can see that my focus point is on the far side of the zero at the number 8 (that looks to be the sharpest to me). So to change it (in a canon EOS50D, sorry I dont know how to do it on other cameras, look in the manual its easy to find). First I turn the camera on, then I hit the menu button, and g0 to the custom functions tab. Then I go to C.FnIII:Autofocus/Drive and hit the set button. Go to the number 7 using the wheel around the set button, and hit set. Then I went to #2: Adjust by lens and then hit the info button to change it use the dial to go negative or positive (go negative if your focus is on the far side of zero and go positive if it is on the close side). Now I dont know how much to change it, but I guessed and went to -8, which was way too much as seen in the next picture
If you look closely you can see that it is focused on the 8 in front of the zero now. I then dialed it down to -3 which its still not quite perfect but it is much better than before.
So I belive that I have made a fairly decent Micro Adjustment focusing tool, which cost me maybe 3 dollars total and about 2 hours of my time. I am now going to use this to micro adjust all my lenses. I’ll see if this works for all types.
Jason
As requested here are the files They should fit on a 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.
These will take you to my flickr page and make sure you get the full size file.
Please leave comments here or on flickr and let me know what you think, thanks
