Photographic lenses and an aspheric optical pickup-lens are designed by using damped least-squares(DLS) method. We start optimization with arbitrary initial damping factor. To improve the rate of convergence and the stability in optimization, we apply the special procedure that estimates numerical adequacy of derivative increments of variables to the DLS method. When the initial damping factor is almost equal to the median of series of eigenvalues, the convergence and the stability of the method significantly are improved. Optimized lenses have the performance of each target.