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.
I have a five session project where four of the sessions were shot with the L-eXtreme filter and 1 with just UV/IR. My goal was to end up with three master lights: one for the UV/IR session done with Adaptive Airy Disk and two from the L-eXtreme sessions done with both extract Ha and extract OIII. I have everything neatly loaded into APP with channel/sessions assignments and "integrate per channel" selected, so I was expecting that APP would ask me which sessions I want the chosen algorithm to apply to. Instead it normalizes and integrates all of the channels with the chosen algorithm. So I end up with unwanted integrations of either my L-eXtreme sessions done with AAD or my UV/IR session done with extract Ha or OIII. I realize that changing the algorithm requires re-normalizing, but then I would have expected to have the option for the normalization to be done by channel also. It seems that I'm going to have to deselect lights appropriately for each pass rather than using multi-channel magic. Am I missing something?
No that works like intended, however is indeed not what you want. In your case you need different APP sessions to use the algorithm of your choice and then later register and normalize those results in 1 new session. Good one for me to ask Mabula about though, might be nice to make that easier if possible. The sessions are needed when you have different flats per session for instance, but for the same type of data.
