DoF Studio
Support
DoF Studio is made by one person. Write to me directly and you'll get a reply from the person who wrote the code.
I usually reply within a couple of days. It helps if you say which iPhone you're on and which iOS version — most measuring questions come down to the hardware.
Your device doesn't support ARKit, so the camera can't work out how far away your subject is. Everything else in the app works exactly as it should — type the distance into the Subject Distance field and the calculation is identical.
Direct depth measurement needs the LiDAR scanner, which is on the Pro models from iPhone 12 Pro onwards. Other recent iPhones can still measure by tracking surfaces and detail in the scene, just less reliably on plain surfaces.
Aim the centre circle at the subject itself, not past it. The reading comes from whatever sits in the middle of the frame, so a gap between a person's arm and their body will measure the wall behind them.
Without LiDAR the app needs something to lock onto. Bare walls, glass, sky and very dark scenes give it nothing. Move slowly — the status pill at the top says Slow down or Not enough detail when tracking is struggling.
LiDAR is accurate to a few centimetres out to about five metres and gets looser beyond that. Past twenty metres or so, type the distance in instead.
Almost always the circle of confusion. It's the assumption about how much blur still counts as sharp, and calculators quietly disagree about it — which is exactly why DoF Studio shows the value it used on screen next to the result.
DoF Studio uses the published figure for each sensor format, and the standard sensor diagonal ÷ 1500 rule for custom sizes. If the other calculator assumes a different value, the depth of field changes with it. Compare the two circle-of-confusion figures before assuming either is wrong.
Tap the camera icon at the top right, then +. Give the body a name and pick its sensor format. Add lenses underneath it, and they'll be one tap away every time you open the app.
Setting a lens's widest aperture means the app won't offer you a stop the lens doesn't have.
Yes. Settings → Units → Imperial, then turn on
Feet and inches to read 11′ 3″ instead of
11.2 ft, the way cine lens barrels are marked. Left on
Automatic, the app follows your device.
The app reads the focal length and aperture out of the photo's EXIF data. Screenshots, images saved from messaging apps and some edited exports have had that stripped out, so there's nothing left to read.
Try a photo straight off the camera. If the shot has a 35 mm equivalent focal length recorded, the app can work out the sensor size from it too.
No. DoF Studio makes no network requests at all — there is no networking code in it. Everything works on a mountainside with no signal, which is rather the point.
Please write. Include the focal length, aperture, sensor format and subject distance you had set, and what you expected instead. The optics are covered by unit tests, so a reproducible case is genuinely useful and gets fixed.
DoF Studio calculates depth of field, near and far focus limits and the hyperfocal distance — and measures the one input you can't read off your lens, using the camera and, where the device has one, the LiDAR scanner.
Your saved kit lives on your device and nowhere else. There is no account, no server and no tracking of any kind. The privacy policy is short because there is very little to say.