webcam colors terrible on HP Spectre 360

[don166]

Hello,

I have an HP Spectre X360 with a built in TrueVision FHD camera.

The colors are not rendered correctly on this webcam.  A green shirt looks purple / red

I can't seem to find any built in software that allows me to control the camera colors, brightness etc.

HP wants me to mail my computer somewhere for 9 days so that they can examine the problem. But I really can't  be without it for 9 days.

I downloaded a program called YouCam, but it was useless for this purpose.

How can I make adjustments to this camera??

[don166]

This is a reply to an older post - HP was unable to solve the issue and the knowledge base did not help me.

The solution is - I doubt there's anything wrong with the hardware - and while the software sucks, it performs as designed. You have to work around it. Here's how. 

Had the same problem this afternoon helping my wife set up for an important presentation over Zoom. Color of her face was an awful yellow.  I thought, strange, I have identical Spectre, have used it often on Zoom, Teams, etc and have not had the problem. After spending an hour trying to figure out how to adjust, realized there is no way to adjust the color of the camera - that's not built into the software. Took her laptop into my office just to see what it did there,  and the color was fine. 

Here's what's going on. Software adjusts the color automatically based on the total image. She had a light blue piece of fabric as a background and wore a light blue top - camera tried to average that out and turned everything yellow. I have a green background in my office - so averages that in and my face looks kind of red, but that's a lot better than yellow. 

Our solution was to try different background colors - end up with  white and everything looks fine. Tan is OK too. Blue, brick red, orange backgrounds do terrible things to color of her face. Green not bad, but can't be too dark - if background dark, your face washes out.  The shirt you wear also has an effect. 

A good solution would be for HP to add color controls to the camera software - but since they haven't, this workaround, while a big pain, does the job.