 If you use a webcam and want to improve the image quality or make adjustments to it, then stick around because I'm going to tell you a great little utility that you can use to do just that. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec. Sometimes I just completely lose my train of thought in those little intros. So what's this video about? Well, it's just all about a simple utility that you can get for the Mac. I believe it may be available for PC as well. But this is specifically about the Mac version, which basically allows you to tweak the settings that you've got for your webcam, whichever webcam that may be. Now, I'm actually for this video using a Canon EOS 60D that's coming into Ecam Live, and then there's all sorts of settings that I can change in that. But what I'm talking about today is specifically for webcams and how you can make adjustments. So if you're using them, for example, going straight into Zoom or Microsoft Teams or something like that. So let me just first show you what this app is. It is called Webcam Settings, very conveniently titled because that's exactly what it does. It changes the settings of your webcam and it's $7.99 in the Mac App Store. I will, of course, leave a link in the description. Now, I should just point out, if you go and have a look at the reviews, which is a great place to start when looking for an app, this doesn't actually look that great. 2.4 out of 5. So there's a few issues that some people might highlight with this, or maybe when people get the application and it doesn't work exactly as they say, then rather than evaluating fairly, people tend to either give it one star or five stars. And so that is why we've got this average figure here. The one thing that I should point out about it is that with the current MacBooks and in fact, I think for the past three years, something like that, the Apple has restricted the access to be able to tweak settings of webcams that are built in. So the built-in camera that you might have in your MacBook. So as far as I'm aware, this doesn't actually work with the built-in cameras that you've got on your MacBook. However, it will work with external cameras. And I think that that is part of the reason why some people have given this the thumbs down or the one star review is because of it not working with those particular cameras. But for the purpose that it's intended and is capable of controlling, which is an external webcam for me, I found that it's been quite useful really. So let's just go and show you exactly how it works. Now I've prepared a little shot here that has got me and then it's also got me in my little Logitech webcam here as well. So this is a Logitech C920, one of the most popular, I think, sort of little webcams that you can get to sit on top of your computer. And so here we've got the actual application itself. Now I should mention that it does actually just sit up in the menu bar as a little icon up here. So you can access it here about webcam settings and so on. And you can switch between different cameras from within this menu up at the top. And then you can come into this webcam settings panel. And that's what I've got open on the screen there. So now what you can see is, if I come out of demo mode for a second, there we go. So this is the actual settings panel of it. And as you can see, we've got the camera selected at the top. So this is my Logitech C920, as I mentioned. But then if you've got multiple cameras, then they would just all appear in there. So you can adjust the settings of different cameras. I don't know which cameras to look at now. Do a look at this one or do a look at this one. I'll stay looking at this one because the picture is a bit better on that one. But that's the point of this app after all, isn't it, to make the picture a little bit better. So first of all, there is exposure. So we've got the basic settings here and we've got advanced settings and some preferences. So there is exposure mode. Now some of the cameras will not allow you to actually change this, as is the case with this one. But if you could, then you could change that one in here. So then the next settings down are the brightness and contrast. So as you can see, I'm adjusting the brightness and contrast of this. It's just directly adjusting the webcam and then the contrast here. So we can make some tweaks to that. We can also change the saturation. So to get the color a bit better and the sharpness of the image as well. We can also come down to the white balance and it's not to science this by any stretch. As you can see, it's just basically goes between cool and warm. So I can move this slider down here. So there you go. It's very cool colored. And then if I want to make the picture a bit warmer in temperature, then we can do that there. You can also toggle auto on. So it will just do this automatically. If I take it off, you can see you've got a bit more control over it. Now what you can do as well is once you have got these settings all set up, you can save that as a new profile. So for example, if you get this set up, if you're mobile and you use it in different locations, you could have a different profile set up for different locations, different lighting conditions and things like that. Or you may find that for different use cases. So for example on zoom compared to making videos or something like that, you may want to have a different profile for those. And so you can just click on save new profile, give it a profile name. I'll call it test. I've got so many things called test on my computer. It's untrue, but there you go. And then you can also delete the profile or update it and have it load this particular profile on start. So you can see how that has now got a little star next to it. So if I created some other profile, maybe if I change it and create a new one, and I'll call this one test to test to there we go. So now I've got two profiles. And if I click on the little drop down list, you can see that one of them is has got this little star next to it. And that's basically the one that is going to be effectively the default, the one that's going to load up on startup. If you want to change it to test to just click this. And then now you can see that this one has the little star, which means that will be the default profile, which will load on startup. So that is some of the basic settings. I'm not actually sure which cameras do work with the where you can change the exposure settings, but certainly with the Logitech C920, it's not an option. Next, we'll go into the advanced tab. And here you've got a couple of things. So as a default, this is set to off power line frequency. So depending on where you are in the world, there'll be a different frequency of in the power cables. And so this can interfere with the camera. And in fact, if I change from 50 hertz, which is where I am to 60, then you can see or rather, there is 60 hertz in the power lines here. So you can see that this is actually affecting the giving flicker on the camera. So if you've got a new camera and you plug it in and you've got this flicker, then this is a way to eliminate that. And so switching to 50 hertz eliminates that interference. You can also just totally disable it as I say, that's where it is normally when you first start up the app. But then if I click it back on, it solves that flickering problem. I don't have an option for auto, but presumably for some cameras, then this would be an option. Next is backlight compensation. And this, again, is not something that I'm using at the moment because I don't have any backlight. But if you were in front of a window and you had a bright light behind you, then you may want to toggle this one off to make it you stand out more from the background. Finally, we've got this section here with some control. So there is an autofocus already on this camera, obviously. I say obviously, but there is an autofocus on the Logitech C920. But if you want, you can override that by toggling this one off. So now we've turned off the autofocus. And now I can actually just change the focus manually by moving this slider. So perhaps if you are going to be using this camera as I do actually for some top-down shots sometimes. So when I've done demos and things like that, and there's this top-down shot, it's actually this camera. So if you have issues with things going in and out of focus, this is quite a handy little feature that you can just have it constantly focused on the desk, for example. That being a little example. But that is just one other option you've got there is to toggle on and off the autofocus. Next down here, we've got a zoom. So if you want to just zoom into crop from the camera, obviously you can do that in a lot of applications. But if you just want to do it from the camera itself, then you do have a zoom function. It's not entirely linear, I've got to say. I'm not sure exactly how that's figured out. But it seems like it doesn't have a sort of graduated zoom from one end to the other. I don't know if that's a limitation of the camera or not, that it can only do it in certain increments. I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. But it does give you the ability to zoom in slightly. And then once you are zoomed in, there's also this pan and tilt. So you can actually just pan the image as well. So certainly if you're using this with zoom or Microsoft Teams or something like that, it does just mean that you can get your picture adjusted slightly before it actually hits the teams or zoom. Next is a preferences section. So here you can have the option to... I mentioned that the app sits in the menu bar. So you can actually hide the menu bar icon if you don't want it to appear up there. And then you can also have it read auto settings from the webcam and have that either enabled or disabled or have it incrementally. So it can actually just get the automatic settings from the webcam and sort of take those into account. Or you can just turn this off and have it as disabled, which is the default setting. So that basically it's just totally overriding everything that the webcam might be trying to do and you're in total control to it. You can also have it write settings to the webcam as well. So at the moment, everything from the webcam is getting passed through this and this is controlling it. But in some cases you can actually write the settings to the webcam so that they are sort of embedded in it. But again, that is something that may be not going to work in for every camera. But you can click on the little information button and it will give you a little bit more information about this. So that was a short little video about webcam settings, the app. And if you do need to update the image quality or change rather the picture image or things like that that you're getting out to your webcam, it is a great way to do it. I will leave a link to the app in the description down below. It's available in the App Store for, as I say, $7.99. I almost forgot, $7.99. And yeah, for me, there are a lot of negative reviews about it in the App Store. But as I say, I think that most of those are driven by people who are expecting it to work with Apple's built-in cameras. And as I say, for the later models, it did actually used to work with my webcam in my 2013 MacBook Pro. So it will work with the older models, but I'm not sure of the exact date of the cutoff. But certainly with the new ones, I don't think that it will work with those. But certainly for external webcams, you should be fine. If you found this useful, then don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you get notified the moment I make any new videos. And speaking of new videos, I've got more videos coming up next. And I'll leave a list to my app playlist down at the bottom right. Until the next time, have a great day.