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# X2D II Firmware Writes Focus Distance in Feet. Lightroom Reads It as Meters.
- URL: https://blog.tonalphoto.com/x2d-ii-firmware-focus-distance-feet-lightroom/
- Published: 2026-10-28T23:45:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-29T00:15:12.000Z
- Description: U.S. X2D II owners: set to feet, the camera writes feet into a meters field, so Lightroom and Capture One correct close-ups wrong.
- Author: Konrad Michels
- Tags: Hasselblad X2D II, Firmware, Bug Reports

Set your X2D II to show distances in feet, and it writes the focus distance into your RAW files in feet. Lightroom Classic and Capture One read that number as meters, because the EXIF standard says that field is in meters.¹ A close-up shot at 0.67 m reaches them as 2.19 m, and they correct the lens for 2.19 m. Yup. Really.

That makes it almost entirely a U.S. problem. Hardly anyone outside the U.S. sets a camera to feet, and most of the people reading this blog are in the U.S.

I found it accidentally, as one does, with the XCD 90V at its minimum focus distance. The distance scale on the camera showed 2.2\. That can only be feet: the 90V's closest focus is 0.67 m, which is 2.2 ft. The file said 2.19, in a field the EXIF standard defines in meters. Last week I worked a set of 90V rose close-ups straight in Lightroom and couldn't work out why they all looked soft.

💡

****A note on support:** This post represents my personal exploration and testing, not official technical support or guidance from Hasselblad. If you need assistance with your Hasselblad equipment, please contact Hasselblad directly: [customersupport@hasselblad.com](mailto:customersupport@hasselblad.com) for global support, [support.us@hasselblad.com](mailto:support.us@hasselblad.com) for the Americas, or visit hasselblad.com/support for regional options.

> **Key finding:** On the X2D II (tested on firmware 1.3.18.1), with Unit of Distance set to feet, it writes the focus distance in feet into the EXIF field Lightroom and Capture One read as meters. A 0.67 m close-up reaches them as 2.19 m. Set Unit of Distance to Metre. Phocus for Mac is not affected.

## What the X2D II writes when it is set to feet

The camera writes whatever number its distance scale shows, in the unit the scale shows, into a field that is meant to hold meters.

The field is SubjectDistance, the standard EXIF tag for focus distance. The X2D II fills it in, and Lightroom Classic and Capture One both use it to pick their lens corrections. I covered that in [Hasselblad RAW Files Contain Focus Distance After All](https://blog.tonalphoto.com/hasselblad-x2d-ii-focus-distance/). Firmware 1.3.16.1 was the first to write this field at all; files from 1.2.7.16 don't have it. So any firmware from 1.3.16.1 on may have the feet problem. I tested 1.3.18.1, and I would be surprised if the earlier ones behave differently. The standard that defines the tag, [CIPA DC-008](https://www.cipa.jp/std/documents/e/DC-008-2012%5FE.pdf?ref=blog.tonalphoto.com), says the value is "given in meters."¹

The test took two minutes. Camera on a tripod, focus set and left alone. One frame with Unit of Distance on feet, one on Metre, nothing else changed. Then the same with a second lens.

| Lens    | Unit of Distance | SubjectDistance in the file |
| ------- | ---------------- | --------------------------- |
| XCD 55V | feet             | 2.27                        |
| XCD 55V | Metre            | 0.69                        |
| XCD 90V | Metre            | 0.67                        |
| XCD 90V | feet             | 2.19                        |

In each pair the feet number is 3.28 times the meters number (3.29 and 3.27, after rounding to two decimals), and a meter is 3.281 feet. The meters values are right: 0.67 m is the 90V's minimum focus distance in Hasselblad's own specification.

![Two rows of three cards. Camera set to Feet: the distance scale shows 2.2 ft, the file holds 2.19, Lightroom and Capture One read 2.19 m. Camera set to Metre: the file holds 0.67, Lightroom and Capture One read 0.67 m](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f5/ac/f5aca107-db6c-464b-b8b7-7b834c3c955f/content/images/2026/10/fig1-feet-vs-metre.png)

Figure 1\. The same focus, two settings. The file has no place to say which unit it used.

Nothing else in the file records the unit. I compared every readable tag in the feet and metre frames of one pair, and nothing that records a unit differs. So no software reading the file can tell that 2.19 means feet.

## Why Lightroom Classic and Capture One correct for the wrong distance

A lens does not distort the same way at every focus distance, so Adobe's lens profiles carry a set of corrections for different distances, and the program picks one from the distance the file reports. Give them the wrong distance and they pick the wrong correction.

I tested in August that both programs use the field. I changed nothing in a copy of a RAW file except SubjectDistance. Capture One 16.8.4 changed its output, and so did Lightroom Classic. Phocus for Mac produced an identical file, because it ignores this field and uses Hasselblad's own focus data instead. That is why Phocus for Mac users are not affected.

How wrong is wrong? Adobe's lens profile for the XCD 90V spells it out. At f/8, its distortion correction for 0.67 m moves the frame corners by about 266 pixels. Its correction for 2.68 m, the nearest entry to the 2.19 a feet-set camera reports, moves them by about 9 pixels the other way. On an 11,656-pixel-wide frame, that is a difference of roughly 200 to 275 pixels at the corners and about 90 to 125 in the middle of the long edges, depending on how Lightroom blends between its entries.

![Line chart of Adobe's distortion correction for the XCD 90V at f/8, from the centre of the frame to the corner. The 0.67 m curve rises to about 266 pixels at the corner; the 2.68 m curve stays near zero; the infinity curve falls to about minus 70 pixels](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f5/ac/f5aca107-db6c-464b-b8b7-7b834c3c955f/content/images/2026/10/fig3-distortion-by-distance.png)

Figure 2\. Adobe's own numbers for the XCD 90V. The correction a close-up needs and the one it gets when the file says 2.19 are hundreds of pixels apart at the corners.

Phocus for Mac agrees with Adobe's close-focus numbers. With lens correction on, it enlarged my 90V frames at minimum focus by about 2.75 percent, roughly the size of correction Adobe's 0.67 m entry describes. Lightroom applied its infinity correction to the same frames instead, because those files said Infinity (the second problem, below): a few pixels where I measured, and about 70 pixels the other way at the corners by Adobe's numbers. Both programs know this lens needs a substantial correction up close. If your units are set to feet, or the file says Infinity, only one of them gets told the lens is up close.

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## Infinity at close focus, and a distance that stops updating

The feet problem is the clean one. The same field goes wrong in two more ways, and setting the camera to Metre fixes neither. Hasselblad didn't just double down on this one.

**It says "Infinity" when the lens is focused close.** The EXIF standard reserves one value of the field to mean Infinity.¹ On October 28 I shot a flat wall from a tripod with the 90V at minimum focus, then with the 55V at about 0.7 m. All ten frames say Infinity. I turned the camera off, and when I came back two and a half hours later, the same lenses at the same focus, on the same tripod, gave real distances. Lightroom did what the file told it: I measured its vignetting correction on four of those wall frames, and it matches the infinity entry in Adobe's profile, not the 0.67 m one.

![Timeline for 28 October 2026. At 14:25, five XCD 90V frames say Infinity; at 14:26, five XCD 55V frames say Infinity; the camera is off for about two and a half hours; from 16:56 to 16:58 the same lenses at the same focus give real distances](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f5/ac/f5aca107-db6c-464b-b8b7-7b834c3c955f/content/images/2026/10/fig2-timeline.png)

Figure 3\. Same tripod, same focus, different answers. Between the Infinity frames and the real ones, the camera was turned off and on.

But, to misquote Steve Jobs, there's more: Two days earlier the 90V did the same across a whole series: eleven frames, every one of them Infinity, seven of them focused close.

**It stops changing when the focus changes.** In the same session, I moved to the XCD 25V and shot ten frames at different focus distances. Every one of them says 4.64\. The camera's own focus data in those files, which Hasselblad keeps in a private part of the file, changes by a factor of nine across the ten frames. The distance field doesn't move. I saw a version of this in my retrofit testing, with the 1.7x converter on the XCD 135: the distance froze at 1.66 for five frames while the lens kept focusing further out, as I described in the [focus distance retrofit post](https://blog.tonalphoto.com/x2d-ii-focus-distance-retrofit/).

I can't make either of these two happen on demand, and I don't know what triggers them.

## A test would have caught this

The feet problem is the kind of bug the simplest automated test finds. Set the unit to feet, take a frame, read back SubjectDistance, check that it is in meters. That test would have failed on this build. Either no such test exists, or it failed and the firmware shipped anyway.

When Phocus for Mac 4.2.2 crashed on Adaptive CA, I wrote that a unit test [probably would not have caught it](https://blog.tonalphoto.com/phocus-4-2-2-adaptive-ca-crash/), because that bug lived in the timing between two threads. This one has no such excuse. The field's unit is written in the standard, and the camera ignores it.

It is worse than a missing conversion. The camera's own focus data in the file is the same whether the camera is set to feet or Metre. Only the SubjectDistance number changes. My reading of the files is that the camera works out the distance in its own terms, converts it to feet for the display, and then writes the converted display number into a field meant for meters. It had the meters value and wrote the feet one.

It stings more because it is the firmware. I have spent a lot of this blog contrasting Hasselblad's careful hardware with its software. The X2D II's stabilization is rated against a published CIPA standard,² and in my [X2D II vs X2D 100C comparison](https://blog.tonalphoto.com/hasselblad-x2d-ii-vs-100c-worth-it/) I described holding two-second exposures by hand. The firmware team has usually been on the careful side of that line. Writing feet into a field defined in meters is plain sloppy engineering, by anyone's standard and especially by theirs.

Have you seen the guide? I've published Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac - 85 topics across 8 sections and 251 pages covering everything from HNCS color science to HDR workflows. It's the reference manual Hasselblad hasn't updated since 3.8\. It's $49, and updates are included.

[Get it here ](https://payhip.com/b/6pqAt?ref=blog.tonalphoto.com) 

## How do I fix the X2D II focus distance for Lightroom?

Set the camera to meters: Main Menu, General, Language & Unit, Unit of Distance, Metre. From then on, the distance in your files is in the unit the standard expects, and Lightroom Classic and Capture One read it correctly.

What that does not fix:

- **Frames you have already shot in feet** keep the wrong number in the file. If you're a paid subscriber, email me at [konrad@tonalphoto.com](mailto:konrad@tonalphoto.com) and I'll send you a script that corrects the distance in copies of those files. It leaves your originals alone.
- **The Infinity and frozen-distance problems** happen with either setting.
- **Phocus for Mac users** have nothing to change. Phocus for Mac does not read this field.

If you shoot close-ups and edit in Lightroom or Capture One, the Unit of Distance setting is the one to check.

## Reported to Hasselblad

I sent Hasselblad three separate reports on October 28, one for each problem, with the RAW files and the readings from each one. They have not assigned ticket numbers yet. I will update this post when they do, and when a fix ships.

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## For engineers: what is in the file

The standard, CIPA DC-008-2012 (Exif 2.3), section 4.6.5, part G, page 55, tag 37382 (9206.H): "The distance to the subject, given in meters. Note that if the numerator of the recorded value is FFFFFFFF.H, Infinity shall be indicated; and if the numerator is 0, Distance unknown shall be indicated."¹

What the X2D II stores, read with ExifTool 13.55 (`exiftool -v3 -SubjectDistance`):

- Feet: 227/100 and 219/100\. Metre: 69/100 and 67/100.
- Infinity: the bytes `ff ff ff ff 01 00 00 00`, numerator FFFFFFFF over 1\. ExifTool prints it as 4294967295.
- The frozen XCD 25V value: 464/100 in all ten frames.

To show that the focus did or did not change between frames, I used maker-note tag 0x0082\. In a July test with the 55V at measured distances of 1.5 m, 3 m and infinity, it behaved like the image magnification: 0 at infinity and larger as the focus gets closer. It is undocumented, so treat it as my reading.

The fix for the feet problem is to convert to meters before writing, whatever the display unit. For Infinity, the standard already offers the honest alternative: write 0, "Distance unknown," when the camera does not have a distance, rather than a value every editor will take for Infinity.

One correction to my own earlier post. In [Hasselblad RAW Files Contain Focus Distance After All](https://blog.tonalphoto.com/hasselblad-x2d-ii-focus-distance/) I wrote that the camera writes a real distance only at close focus and records the infinity placeholder by 3 m. That was firmware 1.3.16.1\. On 1.3.18.1 I have now seen the reverse as well: Infinity at 0.67 m, and real distances out to about ten meters. I'm adding an update to that post.

## References

1. [CIPA DC-008-2012, Exchangeable image file format for digital still cameras: Exif Version 2.3 (PDF), section 4.6.5 G, page 55](https://www.cipa.jp/std/documents/e/DC-008-2012%5FE.pdf?ref=blog.tonalphoto.com)
2. [Hasselblad X2D II 100C product page](https://www.hasselblad.com/x-system/x2d-ii-100c/?ref=blog.tonalphoto.com)