Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

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bwells
Posts: 43
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2018 1:01 am

Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

#1

Post by bwells »

I was out tonight to do some imaging and when I selected any of the "Focus Assistant" tools that use a selection, I could not find any way to select a star. It used to be a box would show up somewhere and I just had to move or resize it. But now, there is no box anywhere in the view. All I see is a small arrow-looking red line and "arrow head" in the top-left corner but I am not able to use it or move it or select it.

Is there a way to reset the selection box for the focus tools? I looked but didnt see anything I could do. It acts as if it computed a location that is off the screen, and now it is always off the screen and this means I cannot use any of your focus tools that use a selection box. And when I tried the "Fourier Detail Detection", it would show a message in red text in the panel below saying the size of the selection was too small and I needed to make it larger. But of course, I cannot see it to make it larger.

I am using the "3.2.6.482.0 - 3/11/2021" release on Windows and I tried both the 32 and 64 bit versions. I did not try going back to a previous version - I had problems with my QHY driver before and I do not want to go back to a previous version if I can help it. But, this selection box for Focus worked last year when I was imaging late last year.

Thank you
Bryan
bwells
Posts: 43
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2018 1:01 am

Re: Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

#2

Post by bwells »

I just figured out how to get my selection box back. It turns out the box was the full size of the image. So I just randomly tried "CTRL-Click" with left mouse button and the full-sized selection box showed up red around the full image. I then made it smaller and now it works. Perhaps it was something else, but this method worked to fix the problem.
bwells
Posts: 43
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2018 1:01 am

Re: Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

#3

Post by bwells »

Just wanted to share that last night I noticed that each time I go into the Bahtinov mask sharping or the FWHM sharpening, the selection box will be full image sized or so tiny I cannot access it or something in between. It seems to be random. And I got lucky last night and managed to open/close the tool a few times and got a box I could actually control the size of. But when the box is full image or tiny, it is unusable. I do not remember what used to happen in the past, but I never had a problem seeing and sizing the selection box. So this seems to be a problem that showed up since last fall. It is consistently unpredictable.
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admin
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Re: Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

#4

Post by admin »

Hi,

if the 'Selection Area' button on the toolbar is not clicked then the Bahtinov tool will use the whole image area and cannot be adjusted - I think that is what is happening when you say it is using the full frame. By default, when you start SharpCap and select Bahtinov, the selection button is not clicked for you, so the whole frame will get used.
button.JPG
button.JPG (9.25 KiB) Viewed 684 times
Clicking the button to enable the selection area will then bring up any previously used selection area (it should not be random, although there is a bug somewhere that makes it really tiny sometimes - I have not found this yet).

Once you have enabled the selection area, it will remain on by default if you close/re-open the bahtinov tool or the camera without closing SharpCap.

In SharpCap 4.0, you can double click on the image to re-center and re-size the selection area while it is active - a much easier way to get a good starting point for fine tweaking.

cheers,


Robin
bwells
Posts: 43
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2018 1:01 am

Re: Unable to Find Selection Box for Focus Tools

#5

Post by bwells »

This is very helpful - thank you!
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