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 all,
Got a set of LRGB data that I pre-processed in APP last night. The data all looks pretty good, especially when I compare it to the masters I generated in PixInsight. To my eye, the APP data looks better. Nice job!
But, since I am a PI user and understand that workflow well, I am confused what the next steps are in APP for my integrated masters. Do I load them all and register them to one another? Is there a way I can crop them all equally? Now that I have the masters, I am not entirely sure what to do. If someone can nudge me in the right direction, that would be great.Â
I am looking forward to trying some of the color calibration and star color correction tools, etc.Â
Thank you for your question, combining multi-channel data can be done in different ways.
- Since you have already created the master, just load the masters as lights and register them in 4), then at the bottom of 4) save the registered frames. They will be saved in you work directory with the -reg.fits extension. You can load these directly into the RGB combine tool to make a composite. As a bonus: if you normalize the masters as well in 5) and save these in 5) then they intitial composite will probably be better. The normalization makes your masters bettter compatible. This really helps is if you combine L with R, G,B or narrowband with broadband channels.
- Load all frames of all channels, perform 3) analyse stars, then in 4) choose a reference, usually you want to pick one of your better L frames. Register all data to this reference. Then after registration you have two options. Either normalize all data to the reference, or normalize per channel. If you choose to normalize per channel, only select the frames of 1 of the channels (deselect the others). Use the right-mouse click menu to do this quickly. After normalization of all frames or per channel, integrate the selected frames per channel to create the masters. If you choose to normalize per channel, before integrating the next channel, you will need to select the frames of the new channel and perfrom normalization on those before starting integration.
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Method 2) is probably preferred since the data will only be registered once.
Let me know if these steps are clear and if you need more help 😉
Cheers,
Mabula
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