Sharpcap forcefully applying flats? AstroSharp Ltd SharpCap · Kyle Cerniglia · ... · 2 · 162 · 0

So I have been using the ASI533MC-Pro and recently got a Minicam8 for a different rig and have been running into some weird problems that appear to have flats being applied to the raw frames before processing.

For the first few nights of tweaking settings, I was using the Live Stack to manually capture raw frames (No calibration frames were applied here, stacks were not used). I then used Siril to do all my stacking using the flats, bias, and darks I took and the images looked clean.

Now that I got everything configured correctly, I resumed using my sequencer scripts for frame capture, which loads the profile I just finished setting up. But now, when images are captured and stacked in Siril, I get severe vingnetting and dust motes. If I instead stack the image without any calibration frames, it looks mostly fine (Just a bit noisier since darks aren't applied).

But at no time, have I ever used Sharpcap's internal flats tools, and I verified that even when running with scripts, all the items under the Preprocessing tab is disabled, and the settings text file generated for both methods indicate identical settings.

I’m away from my rig and capture PC but when I do solar and capture flats I have a check against the option to apply the flats just captured right away to the lights taken subsequently. Have you done that without realising maybe? I personally find it immensely useful as eg the image processing tools in live stacking can be applied without magnifying the effect of either dust or vignettes, but in other situations I can see it would be the opposite of what you want.

The main issue is that I'm using a filter wheel, so I'm constantly cycling through different filters.