Q3 - AFc/AFi and face detection

[mholeica]

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Hi all,

Have really been enjoying the Q3 and especially the quality of the OOC jpegs that I’ve been getting. The camera is mainly to take candid photos of my family on our days out, I have found that it struggles to keep AF on a face when there are multiple faces in the shot, especially if the faces move a bit (which happens a lot in children!). I use AFi or AFc as I find AFs don’t work that well for the situations that I shoot. With these AF modes and setting on face detection, the AF keeps jumping from face to face, very difficult to predict which face will have the focus. How does everyone manage this at the moment? I know I can use field focus option but I’d like to keep it on face detection if I can. Hopefully a firmware update will make the face detection more stable. With a single face in shot it works perfectly.

Would love to hear about your strategies.

[SJH]

Hello - yes this does seem to be an issue for larger groups of people overall and I mentioned it in the attached post. Personally I'm just using AFi and spot or field focus (smallest box) in such situations as per my Q2.  Hopefully Leica will fix this with an update around say, for large groups of people, focusing initially on the closest eye and then allowing you to toggle around, I've got another event coming up shortly so I'm also going to try 'tracking' which does seem to be a significant improvement on the Q2.

At the moment eye detect for large groups of people really doesn't work well on the Q3, it just bounces around continuously with boxes and eye 'focus' shifting constantly. I haven't tried it yet with Firmware 1.2 so they might have made some improvements in the update, equally I've now seen some reviewers on YouTube also comment that it's unusable at the moment in large groups.

Overall though the Q3 is a major upgrade over the Q2 and I'm loving mine!

 

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by SJH

[mholeica]

I’ve used it on the new firmware and it’s no better really. I think for now will just have to use field or spot like you say. 

[katieg]

It it’s a mixed bag when you have multiple human subjects in the frame, unfortunately. I have 4 children and the struggle is real. I have had the best luck using Singe Point (Af-S), with the Eye/Face/Body detection setting, yes it will usually display multiple boxes around the subjects, I’ve started to develop muscle memory to move between which subject I want in focus using the arrows on the directional pad button. Af-C with this Eye/Face/Body detection mode is chaotic. I did not get great results with that when I have more than one person in the frame.

If the Af-S with E/F/D mode doesn’t suit well, I will either quickly tap on LCD screen of where I want focus to be, lock it in, and shoot. Or else I will take it off E/F/B detection and put it back on Spot focus setting with Af-S (which is how I photographed Q2 and Q2m with and felt it was more than quick enough for my needs). I have assigned on the of the function buttons in the back of the camera to change focus modes quickly when needed.

It really depends on how busy the background and lighting conditions seems to be I think. I doubt this is getting fixed in updated firmwares down the road though one can hope. Regardless, I still love this camera. 

[adrianh]

Taking fast pictures with eye detection within a bigger group of people is the pinnacle of eye/face detect AF. Either you wait a while for a lot of updates and hope Leica can improve, or you work with a single point and tell the camera what you want to be in focus. Or you try a Sony or Canon and see what state of the art AF means 🙂

[mholeica]

Indeed, I came from a Sony A7iv to my first Leica being the Q3. I think I took the A7iv eye AF for granted, however I have a lot more keepers with the Q3 than with the A7iv (rightly so with the Q3 being so much more expensive!).