CamTune Help

The Basic tab

Exposure

The Auto-Exposure Mode switch is Manual or Auto — CoreMediaIO doesn't expose the 4-position Shutter/Aperture Priority mode some other platforms show. Exposure Time, Gain, and Aperture (whichever your camera actually reports) only respond while Manual is selected.

Image

Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, and Gamma — whichever of these your camera supports. Unsupported controls are hidden entirely rather than shown disabled.

White Balance

An Auto checkbox plus a Temperature slider, same pattern as Exposure: the slider only responds while Auto is off.

The Advanced tab

Power Line Frequency (anti-flicker), Backlight Compensation, Focus, and Zoom/Pan/Tilt — again, only the ones your specific camera actually reports through CoreMediaIO. A camera with a fixed-focus lens, for example, simply won't show a Focus row at all.

Profiles

The Profile row at the bottom of both tabs applies to the whole camera, not just the tab you're on.

Saving

Use Save New… to name and store the camera's current settings as a profile. If you've changed a saved profile's values, the button switches to Save Changes / Revert so the frequent choice — keep editing or go back — is right there instead of buried in a menu.

Managing

The ••• menu has Rename and Delete — kept out of the main row on purpose, since they're used far less often than picking or saving a profile.

Apply at Start

Check Apply this profile when CamTune starts to have it load automatically the next time you launch the app — no manual step.

Preferences

General

Show or hide the CamTune icon in the menu bar.

Camera Communication

Refresh values from camera controls how often CamTune re-reads a control that's currently in Auto, so the slider reflects what the camera itself is doing rather than going stale. Reapply settings to camera is the debounce on slider drags — how long CamTune waits after you stop moving a slider before actually writing the value.

Support

Email Camera Diagnostics to Developer gathers your camera's name, USB IDs, and which CoreMediaIO controls it reports (nothing about your video, since CamTune never touches it), and opens Mail.app with everything pre-filled. Nothing is sent automatically — you review and send it yourself.

Free controls and CamTune Unlimited

What's free

Brightness and Contrast are free, forever — no account, no trial period.

Everything else

Restoring a purchase

If Unlimited doesn't show as active after reinstalling or moving to a new Mac, use Restore Purchases on the purchase screen.

Questions and troubleshooting

A control I expect isn't showing up at all.

It's hidden, not broken — CamTune only shows controls the camera itself reports supporting through CoreMediaIO. Use Email Camera Diagnostics in Preferences to help add support for it.

I dragged a slider and it snapped back a moment later.

Check whether that control's own Auto is on (Gain while Auto-Exposure is Auto is the common case) — while Auto is active, the camera keeps driving the value itself, and CamTune's periodic refresh reflects that rather than overriding it.

I unplugged and replugged my camera, and CamTune shows an error.

CamTune retries automatically for a few seconds, then keeps trying quietly in the background — CoreMediaIO can take a moment to re-publish a reconnected camera. It should recover on its own without relaunching the app.

Does CamTune show me a preview of what my camera sees?

No — by design. CamTune never opens a video capture session at all, so there's no preview to show.