Cant get Color camera to take color photos?

[Savage234]

I recently upgraded to a purpose made astro-camera (Atik Horizon Color). The learning curve has definitely been noticeable, but I cant figure a couple things out.  For some reason the pictures are grey scale when using N.I.N.A. I have tried different binning and formats, but the image is always black and white. 

If I use the ATIK software (Infinity,Dusk) there is an option for 'Color Binning', and that seems to have fixed it for those programs, but N.I.N.A doesn't seem to have that option (you can not select anything for binning, or select 1x1, 2x2 ect.). But what makes it weirder is that the preview is always color using N.I.N.A. I used a pinhole lens cover to take pictures of my computer screen and it always shows up as color images. However, if I take that exact image file that previews in color and move it to pixinsight, it is grey-scale. 

Is this a binning thing, file format problem? At this point I am just confused, if the preview of the image is color shouldn't the image data be color as well?

So far all the problems I have had with this camera have just been simple things that were new to me, but this one is really throwing me for a loop. Thanks for any help. 

I've attached a couple images. The first you can see the NINA preview is color, as well with the couple other I took in the bottom right. And the other in a photo of trying to color saturate the stretched image in Pixinsight, and it says that it cannot saturate a grey-scale image.  I have tried this with Tif, Fits, and various binning types. 

[ollypenrice]

This sounds like a debayering issue. In order to release the colour the image must be debayered prior to stacking, though most software will debayer then stack from a single command. This is a well-written article. https://altaircameras.com/why_debayer_before_stacking/

Olly

[old_eyes]

I am using an OSC camera with NINA.

the previews are debayered automatically, but the data is stored before de-Bayering. This allows for calibration with darks, bias and flats. Then you debayer, align and stack.

Try loading a single file into Pixinsight and using the Debayer process. It should reveal the colour. If it doesn’t then you have a weird problem, but the Pixinsight gurus here will quickly diagnose the issue.

I use the Preprocessing script (under Scripts, Batch, Preprocessing) to do all the routine stuff on a bunch of light frames, but until you are familiar with what is going on it is probably better to go step by step (I certainly found it useful in picking out the silly errors I was making as I learned Pixinsight).