2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I was struggling to combine my LRGB images, which are new to me.
After 3 failures due to some sizing error that I don't completely understand (the first time, I failed to check the multi-channel/multi-session boxes for 2 of the 4 filters, but the 2nd 2 tries, I did and still got the error), I finally got APP to stack by integrating all 4 filters from scratch simultaneously. This yielded a result, but one so bad that I actually forgot to save it! Ha.
But the final stacked image was still B&W. When you integrate each channel and all, and it combines everything, should I get some kind of color result, or do I still have to go back and combine the separate channels?
I'm guessing you have a mono camera? If so, you should be able to load them with just assigning them to the various filters. Not necessarily sessions as that is only really handy when you want to assign multiple different flats that differ between the nights. If the flats are basically the same across the sessions, you can load the L, R, G and B and assign the calibration darks/bias to all of them and the flats per filter. That should produce separate integrations per filter which are registered and normalized against each other. Does that work?
