Getting Help

If Macro Studio isn’t behaving the way you expect, there are a few ways to get help. The fastest path almost always: send your log files.

Send log files (the recommended path)

Share Feedback → Send Log Files… opens a dialog that bundles your recent debug logs and uploads them to Macro Studio’s support team. The same menu also holds Feature Requests… (opens the public request board in your browser — see below), Send Feedback… (opens your mail client) and Send this Stack to Us… (uploads the frames from a stack that went wrong, so we can reproduce it).

The dialog has an optional email address field, pre-filled from your license so you don’t have to retype it, and a View files that will be sent link that opens the log folder — you can read exactly what you’re about to upload before you send it.

What gets sent:

Your recent Macro Studio log files (typically a few hundred KB). If you use the Lightroom plug-in, its own log is one of them.
App version, build identifier, and OS/platform.
Your email address and license key, so we can tie the logs to your support thread.
A machine identifier derived from your hostname and network hardware, so repeat reports from the same computer can be grouped.
Any file and folder paths that appear in the log lines themselves. Macro Studio logs the paths it works with, so your image and folder names will generally be in there. The logs are uploaded as-is, without scrubbing — this is why the dialog lets you read them first.

What does not get sent:

Your images. Log files are text only; no pixel data is included.

If you’d rather not send your license details or file names, email [email protected] instead and describe the problem in your own words.

Anonymous performance statistics

Separately from support logs, Macro Studio can share anonymous performance statistics so we can tune stacking on hardware we can’t test ourselves.

It’s off until you say yes. The setting is three-state: ask (the default), on, or off. While it’s on ask, the app records performance history locally on your computer after every stack and uploads nothing.
You’ll be asked at most twice — once if a stack run degrades or fails, and once after your third successful stack. Decline either time and the setting flips to off permanently; you won’t be prompted again.
What’s in an upload: timings and memory figures for the run, frame count and image resolution, which engine features engaged, a two-number measurement of how much colour speckle the finished stack contains (see below), a hardware and OS description, your language settings (the app’s language preference and your system’s locale), and a random identifier generated on your device. That identifier is not the machine identifier used for support logs, and it isn’t linked to your name, email, or license.
The colour-speckle measurement is there because a rare graphics-card fault can add speckle to an otherwise correct stack, and until now we had no way to tell how often that happens. It is two numbers — how much of the picture is speckled (0 to 1), and how strong the speckle is. A measurement, not picture content: nothing of your image can be reconstructed from it.
Degraded runs attach performance log lines, filtered to a whitelist that carries counts, timings and device names — never file paths or file names.
Once you’ve opted in, healthy runs upload only a sample rather than every run.

Turn it on or off any time under Preferences → Share anonymous performance statistics. See the Privacy Policy for the full statement.

Other network activity

Three things reach the network without being tied to a stack:

A license check, when you first activate and then in the background at each launch, confirming your license is still valid on this machine. Alongside your license key, email address, and machine identifier, it sends a description of your computer (processor, graphics card, memory, free disk space, operating system, and app version) and a handful of preference values: your Editor mode, your language settings, your default Look, whether Match camera brightness is on, and whether performance-statistics sharing is on. Note that last one is the setting, not any statistics — no performance data is sent unless you’ve opted in. No image data or file names are included.
Update checks, once per day at launch, plus File → Check for Updates… on demand.
An announcement check at launch, which asks our server whether there’s an in-app notice to display (for example, a heads-up about a known issue). It sends your app version and platform. This one is not tied to the update-check preference.

Everything else — stacking, editing, saving — runs entirely on your machine.

Email support

For everything else — questions, refunds, license moves — email [email protected].

When emailing, please include:

Your Macro Studio version (visible at the bottom of Preferences).
Your OS and version.
A description of what you were trying to do and what happened instead.
Steps to reproduce, if you can.
The exact wording of any message bar you saw (see below).

Copying an error message

When Macro Studio shows a message bar across the top of the window — a stack failure, a reduced-memory notice, an announcement — you can take the wording with you three ways:

Drag across it and press Cmd+C (macOS) or Ctrl+C (Windows), the way you would in any other app. Double-clicking a word picks it out; on a stack failure that grabs the whole file name in one go.
Press Cmd+A / Ctrl+A first. That selects the whole message, not just the part on screen — see below.
Right-click the bar and choose Copy message. Same result as select-all, without the selecting.

Why the difference matters: a long message is shortened on screen with a ”…”, and the part that gets cut is often the part that says what to do about it. Dragging gives you exactly what you dragged over. Select-all and right-click give you the whole thing, cut-off part included. Hovering the bar also shows the full message.

The Editor’s blue and amber notice bars are selectable and right-clickable too. They never shorten anything, so there is no hidden tail to recover there.

If the problem is something you can see in a photo — a colour fringe, a halo, a soft patch — tell us where it is. Right-click the spot in the Library or Editor preview and choose Copy coordinates, then paste the result — something like (4210,980) — into your email. It saves a round-trip of “which antenna?”

Common things to try before contacting support

Some issues have quick fixes that don’t need a support round-trip:

“Stacking finished but the result looks weird”

Check for a motion-blurred or misaligned source frame — a single bad frame can soften a patch of the result. See Stacking.
Verify your frames overlap in focus zones (no big focus gaps between frames).
Check that exposure was consistent (shoot in manual mode).

”The app is slow on large stacks”

Memory demand is driven mostly by your sensor resolution, not frame count — see System Requirements.
If you see an amber “Running in reduced-memory mode” notice, the app has deliberately traded speed for a smaller memory footprint. Closing other heavy apps (browsers with many tabs, Lightroom, Photoshop) and re-stacking will bring the speed back. If you already know why and don’t want telling every time, turn off Preferences → Show performance notices — that hides the notice only; stacking and the debug log are unchanged.
Point Preferences → Advanced → Scratch folder at a fast drive with plenty of free space if your system drive is tight.

”Some thumbnails are missing in the filmstrip”

Check the File type filters above the filmstrip — you might have hidden a type.
Hit refresh in the Folder browser to re-scan the folder.

”My license won’t activate”

If you’ve just bought it, wait a few minutes and try Activate again — occasionally a purchase takes a little longer to finish registering on our side, and until it does the app can’t find the license yet.
Confirm you have an internet connection — activation needs one. If the message says we couldn’t reach the licensing server, that’s the connection rather than your key — the app already retries a few times on its own before telling you, so check you’re online and click Activate again.
Check your email for the license key — it comes from [email protected], and it is often in the junk folder. Paddle’s payment receipt does not contain the key, so don’t go looking there.
Each license activates on up to 3 machines — if you’ve used yours up, email support to free a slot.

”Updates aren’t showing up”

Use File → Check for Updates… to trigger a manual check.
Auto-checks run once per day at launch.

Feature requests and feedback

Macro Studio is built by an active macro photographer — your input shapes what gets built next.

Feature requests have their own home: Share Feedback → Feature Requests… opens the public request board at feedback.macrostudio.pro. Post an idea, upvote someone else’s, and follow what’s planned or already in progress on the roadmap. It’s worth a look before you write in — the thing you want may already be filed, and adding your vote to an existing request tells us more than a second copy of it does. Opening the board sends us nothing about you or your images; it’s an ordinary website, and whether you sign in to post or vote is up to you.

You can also just email [email protected], and don’t worry about being too detailed or too vague. “I wish stacking was faster on 50-frame stacks” is just as useful as a fully-specced design proposal.

Refunds

30-day money-back guarantee. Email [email protected] within 30 days of purchase, or request a refund through your Paddle receipt directly. See the Refund Policy for the full terms.

Pricing and licensing questions

See the pricing page for current cost. The FAQ covers most licensing questions. Anything else, email support.