Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Hello fellow APP users,
With APP not yet including a full set of image processing tools, I wanted to understand what best practices folks may have for performing things like noise reduction and deconvolution in other tools which provide them.
Some of these sort of operations are best performed on linear data, so starting with an export of an unstretched image from APP is probably a good starting point. However, outside of something like Pixinsight, there aren’t a lot of tools that I’m aware of that perform these things on images in linear form.
Is anyone willing to describe their general workflow for applying additional processing outside of APP?
@mabula-admin or @vincent-mod, any ideas or suggestions on best practices?
I have Photoshop with astro plugins, StarTools, Pixinsight and APP. My current method is to process in APP then depending on what further processing is required, I choose the best tool. Usually I just go to Photoshop with the stretched data for some final touch-ups. If I feel more post processing is required I'll load the linear - non stretched - data into Star Tools for whatever is required. Star Tools is only about $50 US and only covers the functions after calibration. Star Tools is the opposite of Pixinsight in that it automates a lot of processes while Pixinsight requires more user decision making. I find StarTools is quicker.
Its too bad that StarTools and APP didn't work together and provide a complete system as they seem to have some similar philosophies. You can, of course use Pixinsight. I just find it non intuitive and time consuming compared to other choices. I'm just glad APP came along and will continue adding function.
