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.
Hi Mabula
I've been doing some Bi-Colour work recently (Ha and OIII), just single panels, so NOT mosaics, and I just wanted to check if I'm doing it right. I did find another similar topic on this, but it was for doing a mosaic so I wasn't sure if that changes things.
So my workflow goes something like this:
1. Firstly, do the Ha stack. Take note of which frame APP used as the Reference Frame.
2. Clear everything, then proceed to do the OIII stack. But here I also add in the Ha Reference Frame too. After completing stage 3 (Star Analysis), I make sure to select the Ha Frame as the Reference Frame. Then when I get to stage 6 (Integration) I de-select the Ha frame and just stack the OIII frames.
This gives me the OIII stack in the correct alignment for merging with the Ha frame.
Is this the best way to go about doing this?
Also, I have read that when doing Bi-Colour imaging it is important for the final Ha and OIII channels to have similar histograms (as much as possible) before combining them into a false colour image. Obviously for a lot of targets the signal is usually weaker for OIII (I'm using a DSLR), but is there another step I should be doing to try and get the Ha and OIII stacks to output at a similar level to each other? Is there a best-practice method of doing the Normalization (or some other specific setting) that would help with this?
Cheers.
Hi Xiga,
In your particular workflow, you will need to be aware of the influence of the integration compostion mode setting in 6) integrate.
You will need to set it to reference.
That will ensure that the integrations of Ha & OIII have the exact same field of view besides being registered to the same reference frame.
If you use the full composition mode setting, then the field of views don't match and you can't directly combine the 2 integrations.
Regarding data normalization between the channels:
In my experience, this is indeed usefull to have the data normalized for background and dispersion/noise. The basically matches the histograms like you indicate. It works really well with broadband data like R,G,B filter data. But on narrowband data this is much less certain to work well. It does depend on the quality of the data and the amount of signal present. If both Ha & OII have good signal (nebulosity showing well in both bands) then the normalization will help you. But if Ha shows much more nebulosity then OIII it might work less, chances are that the OIII data will be normalized to aggresively, giving to much OIII noise in your integration.
My recommendation would be to simply test this:
If you have made your Ha and OIII stacks (perfectly registered to each other). You can load both integrations as lights, in 4) register, disable registration with the "no registration" mode, and then play with the available normalization method settings (add, multiply, add-scale, multiply-scale) and save the normalized frames in 5).
In most cases, the multiply-scale normalization mode probably works best 😉
Let me know what differences that you see and which setting works best for you.
And If you load the normalized (and registered) stacks in the RGB combine tool, then you will still have all flexibility to adjust 😉
Kind regards,
Mabula
Hi Xiga,
In your particular workflow, you will need to be aware of the influence of the integration compostion mode setting in 6) integrate.
You will need to set it to reference.
That will ensure that the integrations of Ha & OIII have the exact same field of view besides being registered to the same reference frame.
If you use the full composition mode setting, then the field of views don't match and you can't directly combine the 2 integrations.
Regarding data normalization between the channels:
In my experience, this is indeed usefull to have the data normalized for background and dispersion/noise. The basically matches the histograms like you indicate. It works really well with broadband data like R,G,B filter data. But on narrowband data this is much less certain to work well. It does depend on the quality of the data and the amount of signal present. If both Ha & OII have good signal (nebulosity showing well in both bands) then the normalization will help you. But if Ha shows much more nebulosity then OIII it might work less, chances are that the OIII data will be normalized to aggresively, giving to much OIII noise in your integration.
My recommendation would be to simply test this:
If you have made your Ha and OIII stacks (perfectly registered to each other). You can load both integrations as lights, in 4) register, disable registration with the "no registration" mode, and then play with the available normalization method settings (add, multiply, add-scale, multiply-scale) and save the normalized frames in 5).
In most cases, the multiply-scale normalization mode probably works best 😉
Let me know what differences that you see and which setting works best for you.
And If you load the normalized (and registered) stacks in the RGB combine tool, then you will still have all flexibility to adjust 😉
Kind regards,
Mabula
Thanks Mabula!
Ok, just so that I'm absolutely clear on this...
When I do the Ha stack to begin with, do I also have to use 'Reference' or do I just leave it as 'Full'? Does it even matter which one is chosen at this point?
And then I just proceed with the OIII stack exactly as I layed out above, except I choose 'Reference'. Is that it?
Thanks for the info on how best to combine Narrowband frames. I'm very new to NB imaging, and my data is not exactly what you would call amazing by any means, so I will experiment with the different Normalisation settings and see what works best.
Ciarán.
Hi Ciarán,
You will need to set the composition mode to reference for both integrations.
That ensures that both stacks have the exact same composition as the chosen reference frame.
Let me know the results 😉
Mabula
