Effect of L-eNhance Filter -- M27

[donstim]

Thanks Chris.

I had just made a fairly lengthy post, but it seems to have disappeared into the ether. I agree that the native driver uses 50/50, but the camera SDK appears to use 52/95 (or 50/90). When using SharpCap or FireCap, there is no need to install any ZWO camera driver. It really doesn't have anything to do with Menno's and my equipment. Why would ZWO provide an SDK with one value and a driver with another value? Presumably, anyone using SharpCap or FireCap and had no need to install a driver would just use the SDK value like Menno.

Another anomaly I've found is that FireCapture has the defaults as 50/90, not 52/95. And once I have values in FireCapture, they transfer back to SharpCap (and vice versa). The difference is that with FireCapture, there is a button to reset the color balance to default. There isn't that same capability in SharpCap. If I hold the CTRL key down while selecting the camera, it just resets to whatever was last used in FireCapture, not to the supposed SDK "default". (Note this is without the ZWO camera drivers installed.)

Don

Edit: Oops, forgot to respond to your other suggestions. Thanks, yes I admit I pretty much skipped over a proper setup. I have become very accustomed to using the brain tool. With the filter on, it made the sky dark enough that I could not get a good result for my max exposure time of 30 seconds. So, rather than setting it up properly by examining the live view histogram, I just picked something that seemed to work although it was definitely clipping.

Edit#2: I've found a couple of long forum discussions on setting the brightness level. Although there isn't universal agreement on all the particulars, I will start using the method Robin explains here using dark frames: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1209&start=50#p6863. That should prevent clipping while preserving dynamic range.

Edit#3: Fixed link in above message. Had the wrong link.