Canon R6 Subject Detection missing?

[JSicking84]

I currently own a Canon EOS R6 and I'm having a hard time finding understanding what settings or shooting modes are required for AF Eye Tracking to actually work.

I recently rented another R6 (fairly certain it was NOT a Mark II) and noticed that when I select AF Face Tracking, the viewfinder began to show white boxes around different faces prior to engaging AF. I've since tried replicating the settings on my own R6, but no matter what I do I can't seem to get it to show those similar boxes prior to engaging the AF.

I had previously setup a few Back Button Focus options but have since reverted those settings in case that was somehow the culprit. Ive tried enabling Continuous AF as well and I can tell the camera is continuously focusing but no white boxes appear. I'm kind of at a loss as to what specific setting or mode I've enabled that's preventing this from happening but I'd love to get it working again if possible. 

Today I only see a single white box which I can move around the frame by tapping on the viewfinder, but it won't lock on or track faces/subjects. I also see the Enable/Disable option that's available for Face Tracking but I can't see or tell any major difference in the way the camera operates when it's turned on.

[Waddizzle]

I suggest that you completely reset the camera back to its factory defaults.  I believe subject tracking is the factory default behavior for the AF system.  There are numerous tutorials on YouTube on the topic of the advanced subject tracking features in R Series bodies.

[p4pictures · Accepted solution]

I have an EOS R6 and can replicate both of your conditions at will.

With my camera set up like this… and pointed at a screen full of faces I see the 2nd display.

But if you change the setting for the initial AF point with servo AF from auto to either of the other two options, this changes the result like this.

But once you press the shutter button to initiate focus then it jumps and surrounds the obvious face. The biggest clue you changed that initial AF pt for face + tracking is the presence of the extra four white corners at the edge of the frame. They represent the limits of where you can put the initial AF point. It's used as a targeting for the AF, I can aim the central white square at the face I want the camera to focus on, and it will follow them as I recompose or they move around my screen.

If you turn eye detection on, then it will look for the eyes rather than just the head, but the focus points will be smaller.

[JSicking84]

Thank you so much for this detailed breakdown! This is exactly what I was looking for! I've actually been trying to reply to this thread for days now but everytime I attempt to access this particular thread via Google Chrome it completely crashes my browser, so I had to access this via another browser for the time being.

The one disconnect I do see is that I don't always see the option to swap between multiple faces (white box with arrows on either side from your second image). It would be helpful to know if there's an additional setting I seem to be overlooking for this, but regardless this is a huge step forward for me so thank you!

[p4pictures]

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@JSicking84 wrote:

The one disconnect I do see is that I don't always see the option to swap between multiple faces (white box with arrows on either side from your second image). It would be helpful to know if there's an additional setting I seem to be overlooking for this, but regardless this is a huge step forward for me so thank you!

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The reason you might not see the option to swap between multiple faces would appear to be down to your camera setting. On my EOS R6 I set the multi controller aka joystick to direct AF point selection. You can do this with the customise buttons setting and then navigate to the end of the list where you find the "joystick", by default it is set to OFF, but I change mine so that at any time I can simply move the joystick to move the AF point. The side effect of this is that I can use the joystick to swap between faces as per my screen capture above. I just tried my camera with the joystick set to its default setting and cannot use it to swap faces.

Here's the screen captures from my EOS R6 to do this additional step