For those using the OSX version of Lightburn and have a camera setup, you may have noticed that if you put a small bright object in the center of the table and try to capture it, the details are completely lost because auto exposure can not adjust for it. This is very annoying of course because e.i. at the time of camera alignment, you hardly see the engraved patterns.
Reading am old post (Exposure control) there was no solution provided so I did a research to see if I could solve this as it was bothering me A LOT.
So I found a little source https://github.com/jtfrey/uvc-util, that seems to do the job.
After compiling the source with Xcode, I placed the binary in /usr/local/bin and I also placed there a shell script that I can run every time I reboot, or reset the camera.
So, first thing to do is to identify your camera. This is done with the following command:
uvc-util -d
and you get something like this
The using the Vend:Prod ID you can execute the following commands, replacing of course 0x0bda:0x3036 with your own.
uvc-util -V 0x0bda:0x3036 -s auto-exposure-mode=maximum (Take the exposure to Manual Control)
uvc-util -V 0x0bda:0x3036 -s exposure-time-abs=default ( Uses the default exposure)
The is all is needed. Of course you can adjust the exposure-time-abs as needed, for me the default works fine. And also you can adjust other parameters too like Brightness, Contrast, Gain, Sharpness, etc.
I would be very excited if this could be embedded in Lightburn somehow, but at the moment I am more than happy with the result I have.