damn, you are right, i have just tried taking some raw images (based on the Nikon D1) with the toucam and then converting to colour and the white blance made no difference at all!
Mars colour has been great, but saturn disgusting!!!!
Back to the drawing board!!!
far right: raw with white balance on
middle right: converted colour
middle left: with red slider in the white balance area pulled to the far right
far left: converted colour
Can't help with the rapidly moving object, but can I suggest that once you nail the "correct" setting you either record it, or better still "Save" it with WCCtrl.
Guys, for what it's worth, my $0.02 is that the raw mod isn't going to make a lot of improvement if you're imaging without tracking - the motion of the object through the field of view will add enough blurring to each frame that the small increase in image quality from the raw mod is lost.
You might find it more productive to stay with the normal ToUcam firmware for the time being, until you get some sort of tracking...
If you want something exciting to do, how about replace the colour ccd with the monochrome ccd and then buy yourself a filter wheel and filters, that will make a *lot* of difference, plus you get the fun of doing all your image three times :-)
If you want something exciting to do, how about replace the colour ccd with the monochrome ccd and then buy yourself a filter wheel and filters, that will make a *lot* of difference, plus you get the fun of doing all your image three times :-)
With a monochrome ccd then the RAW mod makes sense, cause youre just getting 640x480 pixels of monochrome data, you no longer want the onboard colour processing.
Make sure you check out the sensitivity test, it's very revealing!
That's a very interesting link Anthony.. apart from the B/W chip, it looks like the standard colour mode (no firmware changes) is the best bet for the normal ToUcam. That's good, because I gave up on any firmware changes long ago as I wasn't happy with the results.
Ken, the monochrome camera + RGB filters will give a better result whether you've got tracking or not. It increases the frustration factor, but it also increases the quality of the image.
DP, the main problem with the low cost filters (ie coloured glass) is their transmission characteristics - they have a lot of crossover, i.e. the blue filter lets through a lot of green and red, so you get funny results when you recombine to make a colour image.
The expensive filters are not coloured glass, they are something else entirely and use special coatings to let through only narrow bands of light. You can usually rely on these filters to give you images that recombine to make a true colour image.
