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.
Hello,
how far are the developments concerning greater mosaics with APP?
A while ago APP had difficulties managing this and often forced (me) to downscale mosaics. Rather bad when this is NOT why doing mosaics: loosing resolution. Can APP for examples use swap files meanwhile?
I want to process 24 panels of 61 mp each, of a 6200mm..
Stefan
Hi,
Same question here.
According to the pop up message from APP, the current technical limit for a mosaic is 715 megapixels before downscaling the resulting mosaic.
Can you explain this limitation ?
David
I found my old request:
answer is still due 🤓 😜
I checked with Mabula. It indeed still is on the TODO list and will not be part of APP 2.0.0.
too bad.. so this means another 2 years plus? 😬 🍹
(Mosaics are one of THE features of APP, right? Cam's have more resolution ...)
Hi Stefan @elgol & David @dav78,
Our old development platform had a technical limit in such that the image could never be larger than 2^31 = 2GigaPixels... and this holds for mono. For RGB, since you have 3 channels, the limit is 2GigaPixels divided by 3 = roughly 715 megapixels.
Now, with our new and updated development platform, I will see if we can overcome this technical limit. It is on the ToDo.
I also need to revise the preview filter which is also on our ToDo, so it will be easier in terms of RAM memory to load and see such an image if RAM is not sufficient.
APP is already using swap files, so that is not the issue here. Another issue is that you want to see the image with OpenGL/GPU hardware rendering, now most videocards do not allow for texture sizes that big simply. So the OpenGL image viewer needs to be updated as well to use multiple textures if such a big image is loaded. The current behaviour is that it now falls back to CPU rendering, and then you need all pixels in RAM to make it work in such a way that you can still zoom in/out nicely, see all details without having big loss of performance. If you would use swapping, it will be much slower of course.
So we need to conquer differnent problems to make this easier, and all are definitely on our ToDo goin forward, not having mentioned even that the mosaic algortihms will be greatly improved as well as will the registration engine 😉
We have a lot of work ahead !
Mabula
@mabula-admin Great Mabula! And I really feel a big difference in overall speed with 2.0.... 👍
Thanks for the explanations @mabula-admin
Let's see if you can manage to improve this technical limit 👍
David
