How do I figure out what settings I need to change? Why is my image pink and so bright?

[SwayamSahoo11742]

I have recently been into taking pictures of the sky and made an allsky camera. I got the build working and focused my lens, but my images look like:

here are my settings:

I am very new to this stuff, how do I know what settings to change to fix this issue? is there a tutorial or guide for this?

[chvvkumar]

What hardware are you using? A good starting point would be to turn off auto exposure and auto gain, trial and error what exposure settings work for you and adjust auto exposure and gain to be in the similar ballpark. But you shouldn't have to do this as auto exposure should get to the right exposure on it's own.

[SwayamSahoo11742]

I am using the Pi hq camera (IMX477). is it something to do with the hardware that might be causing the issue?

[chvvkumar]

I am using the same camera and these are my settings:

[EricClaeys]

With RPi cameras I suggest leaving auto exposure and gain ON. During daytime, leave auto white balance on as well.
Your picture looks like gain is high, but it should be 1. In the "Overlay" section of the WebUI's Settings page, turn on "Show gain" and "Show mean" (not sure on that name). You want to see what Allsky thinks the brightness is. Also, increase the line height so the lines aren't on top of each other.
Does your camera have an IR (infra red) filter? Most do, but the ones that don't have funky colors like that.

[SwayamSahoo11742]

This is what I am getting after changing the layout. nighttime image btw. The gain should be one, so I am not sure whats wrong, and if I change the exposure it doesnt seem to improve. Could it be because of the mean?

[EricClaeys]

@SwayamSahoo11742, what program and settings did you use when focusing the lens? I assume those pictures looked pretty good?

[SwayamSahoo11742]

I am using the Pi HQ fish eye lenses, and to focus them I was told to scre/unscrew them, and I unscrewed it 2.5 turns until the images I got with it were good. TO take those pictures, I used libcamera

[EricClaeys]

@SwayamSahoo11742, the Mean Target setting in the WebUI tells Allsky what the target brightness should be in Auto-Exposure mode. I assume you are using the default Mean Target of 0.2. The Mean in your image is the actual mean (i.e., average) brightness of the image. 0.2 is usually pretty good for a nighttime image of the stars. Increasing the Max Exposure when in Auto-Exposure mode just tells Allsky how long an exposure it can use, not what it should use. Auto-Exposure will always try to get close to 0.2 for the mean.

Are your daytime pictures still too bright and too pink? Try running libcamera-hello during the day which bypasses Allsky. If it's also too bright and too pink, then I suggest creating an Issue on the rpicam-apps GitHub page. Tell them about the libcamera-hello image.

[SwayamSahoo11742]

Thank you for the info, really helped. My daytime images are still too pink and bring. I ran it with libcamera-still and got images that were too pink too so it seems its not an Allsky issue. But what I am confused on is that when I run libcamera-vid I get clear videos without the pink? why do they act different?

still pic:

vid:

[EricClaeys]

I have no idea. That's a great question for the rpicam-apps team.

[EricClaeys]

@SwayamSahoo11742, please run libcamera-still--list-cameras and let me know what it says.

[SwayamSahoo11742]

This was the output:

Available cameras
-----------------
0 : imx477 [4056x3040 12-bit RGGB] (/base/soc/i2c0mux/i2c@1/imx477@1a)
    Modes: 'SRGGB10_CSI2P' : 1332x990 [120.05 fps - (696, 528)/2664x1980 crop]
           'SRGGB12_CSI2P' : 2028x1080 [50.03 fps - (0, 440)/4056x2160 crop]
                             2028x1520 [40.01 fps - (0, 0)/4056x3040 crop]
                             4056x3040 [10.00 fps - (0, 0)/4056x3040 crop]