This issue is usually caused by a permission issue on one or more folders on your system. It’s not uncommon for a system update to change the permissions on some folders during the update, and then leave these folders in an incorrect state. It can also happen if you migrate your data from an old machine to a new one.

When this permission issue occurs, our registration code can’t save the serial number in the proper location on your machine and you get the error that you received. The typical fix is to delete one or more support folders, and then let HueShifter automatically recreate the folders.

As a bit of background, we use a registration framework called eSellerate supplied by a company called DigitalRiver. The eSellerate framework can be shared by other software publishers, and it gets placed in a system library folder so that numerous applications can use it. If it gets deleted, any application that relies on it will automatically reinstall the framework.

First, copy the path below to your clipboard. Switch to the Finder and choose "Go to Folder..." from the "Go" menu. Paste the path into the dialog box and click the "Go" button. If "EWSMac.framework" is present in the folder, please move it to the trash. You may have to enter your password to authorize moving the framework to the trash.

/Library/Frameworks

Second, the eSellerate framework writes an activation file that contains your serial number and machine id. Again, copy the path below to your clipboard. Switch to the Finder and choose "Go to Folder..." from the "Go" menu. Paste the path into the dialog box and click the "Go" button.

/Library/Application Support/MindVision

If the folder opens, locate and delete the "PUB4699834788" file if it is present. If the folder isn't found, there is nothing further for you to do.

Please note that you might have other "PUB" files inside this folder. If so, these PUB files belong to other applications that also use the eSellerate framework. It is usually best to delete this entire MindVision folder since it could have a permission problem, but if you do, you will be unregistering the applications to which these other PUB files belong. Don’t worry, you wouldn't permanently break anything. You would simply be asked to reactivate the other applications using the eSellerate framework the next time that you use each of those applications because you deleted their activation files. So you can delete this entire folder if you wish, but be prepared to reactivate other applications as a result.

HueShifter should now launch and activate properly. If not, please contact us via email so that we can help troubleshoot further.

The current version of HueShifter can't do this, but the feature is coming.

When we developed HueShifter for our own use, it frankly never occurred to us to put in the ability to colorize grayscale pixels. We always had the "shift" function in our heads, which meant that there had to be some color in a pixel before it could be shifted. Grayscale pixels have a lack of color and since HueShifter currently uses the hue and saturation to select pixels and uses the saturation to weight any changes to the pixels, a lack of color means that grayscale pixels basically get ignored.

We plan on making the color dimensions (hue, saturation and lightness) selectable, meaning that you could choose to ignore any of these dimensions when selecting pixels. Similarly, we will make a few changes to the target value settings so that you can add color without the saturation restricting changes to the pixels. Right now, the lightness slider is weighted by the pixel's original saturation so if there's no saturation, there's no change.