SharpCap Forums

I don't want to make a big deal of this, but I feel like I have to wade through too many lines in the saved camera settings text file to find what I am looking for. Would there be a way to not include some of the superfluous settings, or allow more user control over what settings are written to this file? For example, if not using ROI, why include pan and tilt settings; if not binning, why include the mono bin setting; if not using auto exposure, why include all the auto exposure-related settings, etc.?

Also, what are the Display Black Point, Display White Point, and Display MidTone Point values showing? I livestack and use the sliders in the livestack histogram to stretch the image. My settings file always has 0, 1, and 0.5, respectively for the three settings. It might be useful to have it show the settings that were used for the livestack histogram, but I'm not sure about that because I don't know what the values are meant to represent.

Thanks for your consideration.
Don

Hi Don,

firstly to cover the display white/black/midpoint values – those are related to the stretching that can apply in histogram on the right-hand side. Although they don't directly affect the saved image, they are very useful to have in the settings file as I've had a number of cases where people have used the stretch functionality to make things visible on screen and then wondered why their saved files are black. A quick look at the settings files reveals exactly what was going on.

Onto the question of why the settings files contain everything – two main reasons… The first is that the same code in to write the settings files as these used to save capture profiles, and writing all the possible settings is definitely required for the latter to make sure that the camera goes back into the correct state when the profile is reloaded. In theory, you could take a capture settings file and rename it and move it to the capture profile folder and then load it. The second reason is that it's not always easy for SharpCap to tell which controls are relevant and which controls are relevant at a particular point in time. SharpCap tracks and understands the main controls fully – things like exposure and gain and binning and so forth. Other controls like auto exposure setting and white balance are simply sliders that let you adjust the number and the changes you may get passed on to the camera software. SharpCap does to currently understand what these controls do. This means that changing the code so that SharpCap would know whether the controls relevant based on the value of all the other controls would be a major undertaking

Finally , on the point of saving live stacking settings – this has been added already to SharpCap 3.3

Cheers, Robin