This is a critical step (we’ll show just how critical later). The next step is to fire up Live View and obtain the best focus possible on the target. This should have strong high contrast edges, and for the testing we’ve been using a FoCal hard target. To use the D500’s automatic AF Fine Tune feature, you need to have the camera on a solid tripod and aimed at a target suitable for calibration. Using the D500 Automatic AF Fine Tune system
Read on for details about how we came to these conclusions. Otherwise (perhaps not surprisingly) we’d recommend to use FoCal! If you want to get your AF Fine Tune in roughly the right area without a computer handy, the D500’s auto AF Fine Tune is great.
The need for absolute perfect focus before calibrating introduces a large amount of variability to the results and the lack of consideration for the overall autofocus system (mechanical, optical and electronic together) leads to suboptimal choices by the camera. In reality, however, the need to manually repeat calibrations to iron out variability in results extends the time taken. On the surface, the D500’s automatic AF Fine Tune system does a fair job of quickly calibrating the autofocus system. There’s a fair amount of detail in this blog post, so I wanted to give a summary of the initial findings.
