Preferences

Open Preferences from File → Preferences… (or ⌘, / Ctrl+,, or on macOS, Macro Studio → Preferences… in the app menu).

Six tabs:

Tab	What’s on it
General	The everyday toggles, the default Look for new stacks, how saved files are named, and the interface language.
Keyboard Shortcuts	Remap any command shortcut, and set what a scroll does on each screen.
Mouse & Scrolling	Scroll direction and wheel sensitivity, with a strip you can scroll over to feel them.
Watermarks	Build the watermark presets the Save dialog offers.
Social Post Tags	The hashtags and post body behind Draft Social Post.
Advanced	Where stacking writes its temporary files, the Adobe DNG Converter, and the troubleshooting options.

The window doesn’t block the app. Leave Preferences open, switch to the Library or the Editor, try the shortcut or the scroll speed you just changed, and come back — no need to close anything. That’s the point of it being a window rather than a modal dialog: keyboard and mouse settings are the ones you most want to try and adjust again straight away.

Most settings save the moment you change them. Flip a checkbox, drag the slider, pick a folder, and it’s stored — there’s no OK or Apply step, and closing the window never loses anything. Two things behave differently:

• Language saves immediately but takes effect the next time you launch Macro Studio.
• Watermarks and Social Post Tags are editors, not switches, so they have their own Save and Revert buttons. A tab with unsaved changes gets a dot on its label, and closing Preferences asks before dropping the work.

You can select an option’s name with the mouse and copy it with Cmd+C (macOS) or Ctrl+C (Windows) — handy for quoting a setting exactly in a support email or a forum post. Clicking the words still flips the checkbox as it always did; only dragging across them selects.

The sections below follow the tab order.

General

Confirm before deleting source images

On by default. When you delete source frames from the filmstrip (right-click → Delete, or ⌘Delete / Ctrl+Delete), a confirmation dialog appears warning that the originals will be moved to the Trash.

Turn this off if you’re confident you won’t fat-finger a delete and want the operation to be one-click.

The confirmation dialog also carries a Don’t ask again checkbox — ticking it there flips this same preference off, so you can turn it off in the moment without opening Preferences.

Automatically check for updates on launch

On by default. Macro Studio checks once per day at launch for a new version. If one exists, a small dialog offers Download or Later.

• The check is silent — no telemetry, no usage data, no identifying info.
• It only happens once per 24 hours regardless of how many times you launch.
• You can always trigger a manual check from File → Check for Updates….

Turn this off if you want full control over when (and whether) updates land — you can still check manually anytime. What happens once you accept an update differs by platform — see Installation.

Share anonymous performance statistics

Off by default. When enabled, Macro Studio sends us a small anonymous summary after each stacking run — stack size, timing, memory use, which engine features engaged, a two-number measurement of how much colour speckle the finished stack contains (it catches a rare graphics-card fault; no picture content), your computer’s CPU / RAM / graphics-card model, and your language settings (the app’s language preference and your system’s locale) — so we can tune performance across hardware we can’t test ourselves. Most of our speed fixes come straight from data like this.

• Off (default): nothing is ever sent. The app may offer this setting up to three times — after a few successful stacks, or when a run slows down — at most once per session, and never again after that or after you answer. A stack that outright fails also puts a Share statistics button on its error message; that one isn’t counted, because the error message appears either way.
• On: summaries are sent automatically in the background, so you’re never interrupted. If a run slows down or fails, its summary also carries that run’s performance log lines (with file paths and file names removed) so we can diagnose it.

Statistics never include your photos, file names, folder paths, or your name, email, or license — see the Privacy Policy for the full list. An anonymous per-install identifier (with no account link) lets us group records; there’s no other identifying information.

Uploads happen in the background and don’t slow the app down. The app also keeps a small local record of recent runs on your computer regardless of this setting; it never leaves your machine unless you opt in.

Show performance notices

On by default. Shows an amber notice when a stack is running slower than usual — most often the reduced-memory notice, which appears when Macro Studio has traded speed for a smaller memory footprint because free RAM is short.

Turn this off if you already know why your machine is slow and don’t need telling — for example if you routinely run heavy disk or processor work alongside Macro Studio, where the notice fires on nearly every stack and stops being news.

• Stacking itself is unchanged either way. This setting controls the notice, not the behaviour it describes.
• Performance is still recorded in the debug log either way, so nothing is lost for diagnosing a slow run later.
• With this off, you also won’t be asked about Share anonymous performance statistics after a slow run. You can still turn that on yourself, above.

The notice also carries its own Don’t show again button — clicking it there flips this same preference off, so you can silence it in the moment without opening Preferences. This is where you turn it back on.

Enable StackCheck (Beta) — suggest frames to drop to improve a stack

Off by default. This one is a beta. After a stack, StackCheck examines what each frame actually contributed and points out any that look like they hurt the result (misaligned, oddly lit, or simply unused) in an amber notice with a button to stack again without them.

Most stacks produce no notice at all; StackCheck only speaks when it has something specific to point at.

• Stacking itself is unchanged either way. This setting controls the notice, not how your stacks are made.
• The suggestion is only ever an offer. Nothing is deleted, no selection changes, and a stack you’ve already made is never altered. Restack without them builds a second one alongside it.
• While it’s in beta, expect to disagree with it sometimes. If a suggestion doesn’t help, tell us which stack and what it said.

Unlike the performance notice above, the StackCheck notice has no Don’t show again button. Its one button is Restack without them, which is worth more. Preferences is the only switch.

Match camera brightness in the Editor

On by default. When you open a photo or stack a set of frames, Macro Studio matches the brightness of the camera’s in-camera JPEG — the same rendering your camera showed you and the Library displays — so the Editor starts at the brightness you expected instead of a darker raw decode.

Turn this off to open images at a flat, neutral raw brightness instead — useful if a bright subject on a dark background reads too bright, or if you prefer to set exposure yourself from a neutral starting point. The setting is sticky and applies to images you open or stack after you change it. To adjust a single image without changing the default, use Exposure in Adjustments.

See Improving Your Image for when to reach for this.

Stay in the Library after starting a stack

Off by default. Pressing Stack normally takes you straight to the Editor so you can watch the stack come together. Turn this on and Macro Studio leaves you in the Library instead, with your place in the filmstrip intact, so you can carry on picking the next bracket while the first one runs.

Because you no longer get moved to the Editor, the EDITOR tab tells you what’s happening instead:

• When you press Stack, the frame you selected flies up to the EDITOR tab — a half-second cue that says where the result is going.
• While it runs, a green bar fills underneath the tab’s label. Queue up a second or third stack and the bar covers all of them together, so it reads as “how far through everything am I” rather than restarting each time.
• When it’s done, the bar sits full-width and gently pulses until you go and look. Visiting the Editor clears it.

A stack that fails or is cancelled clears the bar without pulsing — you get the usual error message instead, rather than being sent to an Editor with nothing new in it.

Nothing else changes: the stack still runs, still lands in the Editor’s history strip, and is waiting for you the moment you switch tabs — press E, or click EDITOR. This is aimed at people working through a folder of brackets in one sitting; if you’re stacking one set at a time, leaving it off is the friendlier default.

Move to the next photo after rating

On by default. When you press 1–5 to give a photo a star rating, Macro Studio jumps straight to the next photo in the filmstrip. That’s what makes rating a folder fast — one keypress per photo, no arrow key in between.

Turn it off to stay on the photo you just rated, which is what you want if you’re going back and forth on a rating rather than working through a folder once.

It stops at the last photo rather than wrapping around to the top, so a long cull can’t quietly lose your place.

Lightroom gates this on Caps Lock. We use a preference instead: Caps Lock is an invisible mode, and it changes what your keyboard does everywhere else in the app.

Show cursor coordinates

On by default. Shows the pixel position under your pointer in a small dark pill next to the zoom readout, in the bottom-left corner of the canvas. It follows the pointer as you move it and disappears when you move off the picture.

It’s there so you can say exactly where something is. “There’s a colour fringe near the left antenna” takes a round-trip to pin down; “there’s a colour fringe at (4210,980)” doesn’t. Turn it off here if you’d rather have the corner clear.

• 0, 0 is the top-left corner of the photo, and y counts downwards. That’s the standard convention — image files, editing tools and photo libraries all count from the top-left — so a position you copy out means the same thing to anyone you send it to.
• The numbers are your image’s real pixels, not screen pixels — the same scale the zoom readout means by 100%. They don’t change when you zoom or pan.
• On the Editor canvas they’re measured against the image after any crop, which is the picture you’re looking at.

Right-click the picture to copy the position you clicked — you get (4210,980), in brackets and with no space, so it drops into the middle of an email sentence as one piece. That works whether or not the readout is switched on, and the same right-click menu carries this setting, so you can turn the pill off without coming here.

The readout appears on the Library preview, both Library compare panels, the Editor canvas, both Editor compare panels, and both Retouch panes. Retouch has no right-click menu, because a right-drag is how you pan it — this checkbox is the only way to switch the readout off there.

It is deliberately not in Spot Correct, Defringe or the brush-mask editor. Those three work on the photo before it was cropped (and the brush works on a smaller working copy), so a position read there would name a different spot than the same position read on the Editor canvas — a wrong number that looks right is worse than no number.

Keep the computer awake while stacking

On by default. While a stack or an Autostack batch is running, Macro Studio asks your computer not to fall asleep on its own. Start a long batch, walk away, and it’s still going when you come back instead of having stopped partway.

What it does not change:

• Sleeping the machine yourself still works. Choosing Sleep from the menu, pressing the power button, or shutting a laptop’s lid puts it to sleep exactly as before. This setting only holds off the idle timer — the one that fires when you haven’t touched anything for a while.
• Your screen still sleeps on its normal schedule on macOS and Windows. Only the computer itself is asked to stay up — stacking doesn’t need anyone watching it, and keeping a laptop’s backlight on for an hour would just cost battery. On Linux the request goes through the system’s idle inhibitor, and desktops differ in whether they take that as a reason to keep the screen lit too, so there your screen may or may not stay on.
• Nothing is held when nothing is running. The request goes out as soon as there’s work — a stack queued, or an Autostack batch started — and is dropped as soon as there’s none left, so an idle Macro Studio never keeps your computer up. A batch holds it for the whole run, including the stretches spent copying files and writing results with no stack actually going: those gaps are minutes long on a big folder, and they’re exactly when a machine would otherwise nod off.

Turn it off if you’d rather your power settings always win — a stack that gets slept through isn’t lost, it just picks up again when the machine wakes.

The same checkbox appears on Autostack’s Confirm step, under the note about running in the background, because that’s the screen you’re on when you set a long run going and leave. Either copy changes the same setting.

Default Look on new Stacks

A notched slider with six stops: Natural, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, Enhanced. It’s the same control that sits at the top of the Editor’s sidebar, and it sets the look that gets baked into every new stack you run.

• Natural — no extra sharpening or local contrast beyond what the source frames carry.
• Enhanced (100%) — the full treatment: extra sharpening plus local contrast.
• The stops in between blend the two.

Fresh installs start at 60% — a bit of polish without the crunch. If you’ve been using Macro Studio since before this slider existed, you keep the old full-Enhanced default of 100% until you move it yourself.

This only affects stacks made after you change it; it doesn’t re-bake anything you’ve already stacked. To change the look on a stack you already have, use the LOOK slider in the Editor — see Look.

Saved file names

The pattern Macro Studio uses to name every stack you save. It fills in the Base name box in the Save window, and it’s also the caption under each thumbnail in the Editor’s history strip — so what a stack is called on screen is what it’s called on disk.

Type any text you like, and click Insert field to drop in details from the photo. Each row of that menu shows the field next to its value for an example photo, so you never have to memorise names:

• Camera — {camera}, {make}, {model}, {lens}
• Exposure — {aperture}, {shutter}, {iso}, {focal}
• Date — {date} and {time} (when the photo was taken), {stack_date} and {stack_time} (when you stacked it), {today}
• Stack — {frame_count} (“24”), {look} (Nat or Enh-60)
• File — {folder} (the folder your frames came from), {first_file} / {last_file}, {first_num} / {last_num} (the frame numbers off the first and last shot)
• Subject — {species}, {species_common}, {species_latin} — filled in once you’ve run Species ID
• Other — {app}, {url}, {version}

The Example line under the box shows the finished name as you type. Reset puts the standard pattern back:

{folder} - {stack_date} {stack_time} MS {look}

Some fields you’ll have met on a watermark card aren’t offered here. {frames} (“24 frames”) is translated, so the same stack would be named differently in a different interface language; {exposure} and {camera_line} join their parts with a |, which no filename can carry — their pieces all have their own fields. {copyright} is left out too: it reads the copyright tag your camera stamps into the file, which Macro Studio can’t set, so for most photos it’s empty — and an empty field in a filename simply closes up and leaves no trace. It’s still there on the watermark card, where showing your copyright is the point.

Three things happen to the finished name automatically, so a pattern can’t produce a file your computer refuses to open:

• Characters no filesystem allows become a hyphen. {shutter} is 1/200 and {aperture} is f/8; in a filename they come out 1-200 and f-8. The same goes for : * ? " < > |.
• A field with nothing in it takes its separator with it. {folder} - {species_common} - {date} on a photo with no species ID reads bees - 2026-06-21, not bees - - 2026-06-21.
• A pattern that comes out empty falls back. If every field in your pattern is blank for that stack, you get the standard name instead of a blank one.

You can still type a different name in the Save window for any single save — the pattern only decides what’s there when the window opens. The Save window also has a Configure… button under its Base name box, which opens this same setting so you can change it mid-save.

If you used “Prepend date”

The Save window used to carry a Prepend date checkbox. It’s gone; the pattern does the same job with {date} (the capture date) or {today}. If you had it ticked, your pattern already starts with the matching field, so your files keep the names they had.

Language

Sets the language of the app’s interface. System default follows your operating system’s language when it’s one Macro Studio ships; otherwise the app runs in English. You can also pick a language explicitly:

English · Deutsch · Español · Filipino · Français · Italiano · Nederlands · Tiếng Việt · Русский · Українська

Unlike the other settings on this page, a language change takes effect after you restart Macro Studio — an amber note appears below the picker to remind you. The app’s interface translates — menus, dialogs, progress messages during stacking, and the standard dialog buttons (OK, Cancel, Yes…). Product terms like Autostack and file formats (TIFF, DNG, RAW) keep their names in every language; Filipino deliberately keeps common photographic terms in English, matching how mainstream Filipino software reads; and a few strings drawn from the underlying UI toolkit (for example the Cut/Copy/Paste menu inside text fields) are translated for every language except Vietnamese and Filipino, which keep those toolkit strings in English.

The translation catalogs ship inside the app and language resolution happens locally.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Remap any command shortcut. Click a field, press the combination you want, and it takes effect immediately — no restart. A key already claimed by another shortcut is refused with a note.

Search at the top to filter the list by action name, section, or key. Click a section heading inside the list to fold it away, or use Expand all / Collapse all above the list. Esc clears the search.

Each row has its own Reset link, and Reset All to Defaults at the bottom restores the lot. A per-row Reset reclaims that action’s default key or keys, so anything you had since put on one of them goes back to its own default too — the tab names everything that moved, which can be more than one row. See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list of remappable actions and their defaults.

Some settings on this tab are dropdowns rather than capture fields, because none of them is a key combination:

• Mouse gestures — a section in the shortcut list setting what a scroll does on each canvas: Zoom, Brush size, Brush feather, Brush strength and Step frames, per screen, each screen listing only what it can do. Choosing a gesture another action already holds swaps the two, on that screen only. Covered by Reset All to Defaults. See Wheel gestures, per screen.

• All editors: Hold to pan the canvas — the last row of the Mouse gestures section (it moved there from its own control). Which key turns a left-drag into a pan in the Retouch, Brush, Spot Correct and Defringe editors. Unlike the rows above it this one setting covers every editor. Spacebar is the default, matching Photoshop and Lightroom; ⌥ / Alt, Shift and ⌘ / Ctrl are the alternatives. Right-drag and middle-drag pan whatever you pick. Takes effect immediately.

  Two things worth knowing if you change it. Spacebar is tracked everywhere now, because it can also carry a Space + scroll wheel gesture — so the Z / Space fit-to-100% toggle happens on the release of Space rather than the press, and a Space hold you scroll during doesn’t toggle at all. A plain tap is unchanged, and Z is untouched. And Shift is already spoken for in two brushes — it flips add/erase for a stroke in the mask Brush, and draws a straight line between two clicks in Retouch. If you pick Shift as your pan key, those still win on the pane you paint on, and you pan there with right-drag instead.

Mouse & Scrolling

The mouse settings, which are global — unlike the per-screen gesture mapping on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab above.

• Scroll direction for navigation — which way a scroll notch counts as forward when stepping frames, history versions and brush sizes. Automatic follows your system scroll setting; if navigation feels reversed, pick the other option. Canvas zoom always follows your system setting regardless.
• Scroll sensitivity — how far you have to scroll to move one frame or one brush step. Set automatically for this mouse is on by default and is what you want: Macro Studio measures how much your wheel reports per click and sizes a step to match, so one click is one frame whether the wheel is detented or free-spinning. Turn it off and the slider takes over, with snap points from less sensitive (two clicks of a traditional wheel per step) through to considerably more.
• The strip below the slider is live. Scroll over it and it steps exactly as the filmstrip does, so you can feel a setting without leaving the tab. Scrolling there is also what performs the automatic measurement — it takes about half a dozen clicks, after which the status line above names the number it found.
• Swapping mice needs nothing from you. The measurement is never saved to disk, and about six clicks of the new mouse re-measure it whichever way the swap goes — from a high-resolution wheel to an ordinary one or the other way round.

On a Mac, trackpads aren’t affected by the sensitivity setting at all, in either mode — macOS tells Macro Studio which scrolls came from a precision device, so trackpad scrolling is recognised and left alone. That’s what lets you switch between a trackpad and a mouse without touching this. An Apple mouse counts as one too, which is worth knowing if you go looking for a difference and don’t find one: scroll over the strip with a trackpad or a Magic Mouse and an amber note says so, because moving the slider genuinely won’t change anything for them.

Windows doesn’t provide that signal, so a Windows precision touchpad is treated like a wheel. In practice that’s fine — touchpad scrolling is too irregular to look like wheel clicks, so it isn’t measured — and if anything ever did throw the measurement off, half a dozen clicks of a real wheel put it back. On a laptop with no mouse attached there are no such clicks to make, so restart the app — or better, if you’d rather none of it could happen, turn Set automatically off and leave the slider on its 120 stop — that’s exactly the behaviour Macro Studio had before this setting existed.

Watermarks

The watermark editor. Watermarks are presets you build once and reuse in the Save dialog:

• Create a watermark from text, an image overlay, or an Info card that auto-fills camera, exposure, stack, and species details from each image’s metadata (see Saving).
• Set placement (top-left, top-right, top-center, bottom-left, bottom-right, bottom-center, center).
• Adjust opacity, font, color, size, padding.
• Save multiple presets for different uses (subtle archival, bold social, etc.).

The Save dialog then picks from these presets via its Watermark dropdown.

Unlike the rest of Preferences, this tab holds your edits until you press Save — a half-typed watermark name would fail the “names must be unique and non-empty” check on every keystroke otherwise. Revert throws the unsaved edits away and reloads what was last saved. While anything is pending, the tab’s label carries a dot, and closing Preferences asks whether to save, discard, or stay.

If the same settings were changed somewhere else while this tab sat open — the Save dialog’s Configure…, or the Share panel’s gear — the tab reloads them when you come back to it. If you had unsaved edits of your own at that moment it can’t reload without losing them, so it asks before overwriting instead.

Social Post Tags

The social tags editor for the Draft Social Post feature.

You can configure:

• A general signature line (your handle, contact, etc.) appended to every draft.
• Generic hashtags that apply to all posts.
• Kingdom-specific hashtags that only appear when the subject is an insect, plant, or mushroom.

Set these up once when you start using Macro Studio’s social features. Every Draft Social Post afterward includes them automatically.

Like Watermarks, this tab holds your edits until you press Save; Revert reloads what was last saved. The tab’s label carries a dot while anything is pending, and closing Preferences asks first. It reloads the same way if these settings were changed elsewhere — from the Share panel’s gear, or the species panel’s — while this tab sat open, and asks before overwriting if you had unsaved edits of your own at the time.

Advanced

Setup you touch once, plus the troubleshooting options.

Scratch folder for stacking

Stacking writes multi-gigabyte temporary files while it works — aligned frames, spilled arrays, blend intermediates. By default they go to your system temporary folder, which lives on your system drive. If that drive is small, point this somewhere roomier.

The row shows the current location (or System default (…) when you haven’t changed it) with two buttons:

• Choose… — pick a folder. Macro Studio tests that it can actually write there and refuses an unwritable pick with a warning rather than saving a path that would silently fall back to the system folder at stack time. On Linux the picker adds a Show hidden folders checkbox, since the native GTK dialog hides dot-folders with no way to reveal them.
• Use default — clear it and go back to the system temporary folder.

Pick a fast local drive — avoid network drives and removable media. The change applies to stacks you start afterwards.

This is the setting to reach for when stacking fails with a disk-space error: both the out-of-space message and the low-swap advice name this preference directly. See System requirements for how much room a stack actually needs.

About the macrostack-… folders you’ll see there. Stacking works in folders whose names start with macrostack-. Some stay in use for as long as Macro Studio is open — a running stack owns one, and a result sitting in your history keeps the one Retouch reads from — so don’t delete them while the app is running. You don’t need to clean them up yourself either: Macro Studio removes its own as it finishes with them, and a folder left behind by a crash is reclaimed the next time the app starts.

Adobe DNG Converter

Adobe’s DNG Converter is a free download that Macro Studio can put to three jobs, if you install it: opening RAW files from cameras too new for the built-in decoder, making the DNG files it saves about half the size, and reading the colour profile that goes into a camera-raw mode Raw DNG.

Macro Studio never downloads, installs, or bundles the converter — it only ever runs a copy you installed yourself.

The status line says whether the converter was found (with its version, on macOS), and links to Adobe’s download page when it isn’t there. The checkboxes are hidden until one is found, since until then they have nothing to act on.

• Use Adobe DNG Converter for files not natively supported — on by default, so there’s nothing to switch on after installing the converter. It can only ever engage on a file that would otherwise fail to load, so leaving it on costs a supported camera nothing. Turn it off to make unreadable RAWs fall back to the embedded JPEG preview (or fail) as they did before. See Cameras too new to decode for what happens with and without it.

  A file that opens normally is never converted just to open it. Two features do convert files that would have opened fine: a stack whose reference frame needs converting converts every frame, whether or not it needed it (converted frames come out a few pixels different in size from native ones, and a stack can’t align two different sizes — so it has to be all or nothing); and a stack run in camera-raw mode (below) converts one frame at stack time, so the camera’s colour profile is ready if you save a Raw DNG — that happens even with this checkbox off, because turning on camera-raw mode is itself the go-ahead. There’s no quality cost either way.

• Compress saved DNG files — on by default. Each DNG you save is handed to the converter, which compresses it and hands it back about half the size with exactly the same pixels. See Compressed DNG files for the detail.

• Stack RAW photos in camera-raw mode — off by default. Stacks made from RAW photos run in the camera’s own colour space, and can additionally be saved as a Raw DNG — a genuinely raw file that opens correctly in any raw editor: Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab, Capture One, ON1, and others. Leave it off unless you want those raw files — it costs something on every stack, whether or not you save one. Stacking takes roughly a third longer (measured on 6- and 36-frame 20-megapixel stacks) and results differ slightly from normal mode. The option lives here because the Raw DNG’s colour profile comes from the converter.

• Locate… — point Macro Studio at a converter it didn’t find on its own, for a non-standard install location. On macOS you can select the .app itself. A pick that isn’t a program Macro Studio can run, or isn’t recognisably the Adobe DNG Converter, is refused rather than saved — pointing it at some other application would only launch that application in the middle of a stack.

Converted copies are cleared every time you restart Macro Studio, and while it’s running each new conversion clears out copies you haven’t opened in a few hours — there’s nothing to manage. Nothing is lost when one goes: it’s rebuilt from the original RAW, which is never modified, in about a second.

Disable GPU acceleration

Off by default, and it should stay that way for almost everyone. With it off, Macro Studio uses your graphics card for parts of stacking — aligning frames, cleaning up colour fringes, and merging the sharp detail together — which is a large part of why stacking is as quick as it is.

Tick it and all of that work moves onto the main processor instead. Nothing changes about what you can do or how the app behaves — every feature still works and gives the same kind of result — but anything that had been using the graphics card gets slower. That is mostly stacking, and also the graphics-card shortcuts inside Source Cloning and the Subject mask in the MASKS panel.

It’s here for one job: answering “is the graphics card to blame?” If a stack comes out with streaks, blocks of noise, wrong colours, or anything else that looks like corruption rather than a focus mistake, run the same stack again with this ticked. If the problem goes away, it’s the graphics driver; if it doesn’t, it’s something else and we can stop looking there. Graphics drivers vary hugely between machines and we can’t test them all, so this is often the fastest way to a real answer — and if it does turn out to be the driver, leaving the box ticked is a working fix until the driver is updated.

The change applies to stacks you start afterwards — there’s nothing to restart. Untick it and the graphics card is used again straight away. The Subject mask picks the change up on the next mask you ask for, which takes a few seconds longer than usual that one time while it reloads.

If you turn this on, mention it when you contact support, along with whether it made a difference. That one detail saves a round of back-and-forth.

Reset Welcome Tour

Re-enables the Welcome card and tour for first-launch helpers. Useful if:

• You dismissed the welcome card and want to see it again.
• You’re demoing the app to someone else and want a clean first impression.
• A new version added a new tour section you haven’t seen.

Click the button; it shows a brief ✓ Reset confirmation for 1.5 s, then returns to normal. Next time you load a folder, the Welcome card reappears.

Reset Announcement Banner

Brings back an announcement — the thin strip that occasionally appears under the mode tabs — that you closed with its ✕.

Closing one is permanent on that computer by design, so the same message never nags you twice. That’s fine until you close one by accident, or want to re-read it, and there was previously no way back. This button is that way back.

Click it and you get the same brief ✓ Reset confirmation. The announcement reappears the next time you start Macro Studio, not straight away — announcements are only ever fetched at launch.

If nothing comes back, the message has simply stopped being sent: they’re published with an end date, and some are aimed at particular app versions or at Windows or Mac only. The reset only clears your end of it.

This is per-computer, like the dismissal itself. Closing an announcement on your laptop was never going to hide it on your desktop, and resetting it here won’t bring it back there either.

Reveal Debug Log in Finder… (or Show in Explorer)

Opens the folder that contains Macro Studio’s debug log files in your OS file manager.

Useful when contacting support — the support team may ask for the latest log. Most of the time, Share Feedback → Send Log Files… is the easier path (it bundles and uploads automatically), but this button gives you direct access to the files.

Version footer

At the bottom left of the window, Macro Studio shows the version number and build identifier in small text. Useful when reporting issues — include this in any support email so we know exactly which build you’re running.

Why so few options?

By design. Macro Studio aims to have one good answer for most decisions rather than burying users in toggles. If you find yourself wishing for a preference that isn’t here, email support — we’d rather hear about real needs than guess at imagined ones.

See also

• Look — what the Default Look slider controls.
• System requirements — how much scratch space and RAM a stack needs.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the full shortcut reference, and what’s remappable.
• Saving — where watermark presets get used.
• Species ID and social posts — where social tags get used.
• Send log files — the support flow.