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 just did a test of some data I have of the rosette nebula, and I have 1 hour of 2 min subs along with 50 of each Darks, Flats and Dark Flats, I put them all into APP and hit intergrate, and approx 2 hours later I have my finished stack, and looked great…
so then I did exactly the same in Affinity Photo stacking, and it took 30 mins and the result was exactly the same.
so why does APP have so many stages and take ssoooooooo much longer to do the same job and ends up with the same result……it seems I have potentially spent £60 on this software when I already had a tool more than capable of doing the job…..🤔🤔🤔🤔
So what am I missing, what is the difference….I realise that APP does a lot more than just stack, but so does affinity….I just don’t see why it takes so much longer to simply stack the images….
Hi William @takfsq85,
I have never used Affinity myself so it will be hard to comment directly on that.
I can only say that Astro Pixel Processor has quite advanced algorithms enabling it to deal with very complex data sets and when compared to other packages, yes APP will be slower but will also be able to process more datasets correctly than other applications. This is the feedback that we constantly get from many users and why APP is being used by many.
"Simply stacking" - well if the data is easy, then the differences will be hard to spot between all the different stack/integration packages. Once the data becomes challenging however, the better algorithms will prevail easily and the results will be obvious. This is our own experience and again what we hear from many APP users.
Mabula
@takfsq85 I am also using both apps. At this moment, I am liking Affinity better for final color work. But for most of the operations before that I am liking APP. For example ...
How do you judge the quality of your individual subs in Affinity?
AFAIK, the answer is subjectively through visual inspection of each sub. How long does that take, and how accurate is it?
After Normalization, APP provides many metrics and an analytical graph to quickly locate problematic subs. I am not sure what all of the metrics actually mean (I just started a thread on this topic), but I can default to the general "Quality" sort.
Even if I did nothing else in APP (which of course is not true), that alone for me makes it worthwhile.
have since run through a few more stack in affinity and it handles them all with ease, and far far quicker than APP, with the same end result, I get that APP is complex, but does it really need to be, under what circumstances exactly would APP do a better job than affinity, ?? as it certainly doesn’t on any of my data, which is all from light polluted bortle 6 skies, so how bad or more complex would the data need to be for APP to do a better job, examples please….?
So no reply from Mabula, so am I to assume that there is no answer….??
never mind I am sure he has much more important things to do than help people who have shelled out a load of money on his software….👍🏼👍🏼
Dear William,
Have you tried to process data from different telescopes into 1 stack? Or tried a mosaic/panorama? Those are definitely the more difficult situations.
Light Pollution in data is hardly an issue to be able to stack data for any package these days. If stars are found then the software will stack it.
Mabula
so for most astrophotographers with 1 telescope using the same camera, (which is over 95% of us) then APP is just not needed and the £25 affinity is more than enough……very good to know…wish I had saved my money now and bought that…..🤔🤔
And the creation of mosaics (which is done a lot these days), true dynamic distortion correction, very good color correction based on the black-body model of stars, etc. We have a trial version as well which is free for anyone to try, we even extend people's trial versions if they need more time to decide if the software is what they want to buy... very sorry you don't like it and we wish you all the best in this great hobby!
@vincent-mod
yes just a Shame that there is no manual so beginners like me have a reference to learn all these things, without having to log in on here all the time, then ask a question and wait two days for an answer….it’s ridiculous to be honest….
Sometimes we take 2 days, many times half a day and many times minutes. It depends a bit on if we're busy with coding as well and such. We're one of the most active forums in the sense of direct developer involvement I think and more than willing to explain everything. You could, for instance, ask multiple questions in 1 forum post and we would be happy to explain all of them (that way you would almost have a mini manual you can always go back to). The actual manual is being worked on as well, starting from our next release.
For relatively simple data the steps are very straight-forward though, so I could tell you in just a few steps how to get a fine result.
@vincent-mod
this one is no where near the most active in terms of the developer involvement, NINA (free software) is the most active, by an absolute mile, that developer is pretty much there all the time and is instant with answers…..not that this is the issue, the issue is people should not be spending loads of money on software then having to run to a forum to find out how to use it, it’s just not right…
