UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
I'm trying out APP for the first time and can't figure out why my single raw images in APP look all green and unbalanced. By the time they are stacked, the image shows a lot more detail than what I've been getting with DSS which is nice, but I'm losing all the nice reds and purples I got on the Orion Nebula. See attachment for a side by side comparison after they are stacked. Any idea why? It's a D5300 camera with 12-bit .NEF files.
Hi @jlawrence904,
Welcome to the APP forum 😉
APP, by default, loads the linear raw sensor data of your NEF files, without applying camera White Balance. If the data looks green, then this is because the unaltered raw data is greenish and this is no problem, but quite normal. If you apply background correction with the Remove Light Pollution tool and then Star Color Calibration, the colors should look fine again 😉
Have a look at this topic, which will probably explain a lot with how the raw data translates to a non-linear pixel with different colors:
DSS probably is applying the camera White Balance by default? You can enable this in APP in 0) RAW/FITS by selecting camera White Balance before processing.
Let me know if this answers your question 😉
Kind regards,
Mabula
I believe the issue turned out to be the LP tool and star color tool like you said. The colors looked more balanced. It's not the deep purple color like I previously had, but I'm thinking that's okay. My colors look balanced and I see much more detail in the final processed image compared to my DSS stack.
Results can be seen here along with previous versions. Any critique is welcome:Â https://www.astrobin.com/322302/F/?nc=user/
Thanks for the help. One small question though-- during calibration, integration, etc... does it matter whether the "stretch" box near the histogram is checked or unchecked? Or is that only when you go to manually save a file with the save button? I just want to make sure data isn't being stretched before getting stacked, if that makes sense.
Hi @jlawrence904,
Okay, thank you for the feedback 😉
I checked your image on astrobin, perhaps the result is a bit too blue now. In star color calibration, you can adjust the calibration with the Blue-Red slider, this basically is the white star calibration. So I would try to adjust the colors a bit more towards Red, did you try that?
One small question though-- during calibration, integration, etc... does it matter whether the "stretch" box near the histogram is checked or unchecked? Or is that only when you go to manually save a file with the save button? I just want to make sure data isn't being stretched before getting stacked, if that makes sense.
No, indeed, it does not matter. The stretch selectxbox next to the save button, only applies to how you save the image when you push the save button. Normally you save the image with the stretch parameters applied. If you disable the stretch button, you will be saving the originally loaded data without the stretch parameters applied.
APP isn't doing any stretching operations in your data in 2) to 6). All data is kept linear if you have fed linear data to start with 😉
Kind regards,
Mabula
