Exposure, focus, white balance and zoom live in the camera’s own hardware. macOS gives you no way in. CamDial is that way in — and it writes your values back when the camera forgets them.
saved — scroll to watch the camera forget
A window behind you, a lamp beside you, and the camera keeps hunting. Set the exposure once and it stops guessing — you look the same at 9am and at 6pm.
Autofocus breathes in and out while you talk, and racks away every time you move a hand. Lock it on your face and it stays there.
Auto white balance drifts as the light changes and your skin goes blue, then orange. Pin the temperature and the colour holds.
CamDial speaks UVC over USB — the same protocol the camera's own firmware uses. The values land in the hardware, so every app sees them: Zoom, Meet, Teams, QuickTime, OBS, anything. There is no virtual camera to select and nothing to keep running in the background of a call.
| Controls it can hold | 12 |
|---|---|
| Seconds to put them back | 8 |
| Video streams it opens | 0 |
| Network connections it can make | 0 |
Exposure, gain, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, white balance, focus, zoom, backlight compensation, hue and power-line frequency — whichever of those your camera reports as supported.
A webcam keeps its settings in volatile memory. Cut its power — unplug the cable, move to another desk, switch the dock off — and it comes back at the factory defaults, with focus and white balance flipped back to automatic.
CamDial watches for that. On a real Logitech C920, every reconnect reset six controls; CamDial noticed and wrote all of them back within eight seconds, without being asked. It does the same check when an app opens the camera and when the Mac wakes, and leaves the camera alone when nothing has moved.
This is the part the manufacturer’s own software gets wrong: it holds your settings in the app, not in the camera, so they last only as long as it keeps running.
CamDial ships as a sandboxed Mac App Store app built without the network entitlement. That is not a promise in a privacy policy — macOS enforces it, and the app is structurally unable to open an outbound connection. It never opens a video stream either. The camera permission exists for one question only: is the camera in use right now, so the settings need putting back?
macOS 14 Sonoma or later on Apple silicon, and a USB webcam that follows the UVC standard — most models from Logitech, Elgato, Razer and Anker do. Verified on the Logitech C920. The built-in FaceTime camera and iPhone Continuity Camera are not supported: macOS does not expose their hardware controls to any app.
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