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 would like to make a suggestion for a future release. It would be helpful to be able to use the quality score to determine which lights are included in an integration. I realize one can set an arbitrtary number of lights to include, but that is just a pure number of lights. It would be better if one could take advantage of the quality scores that are assigned to each light. So, for example, to eliminate all lights from the integration whose quality score are 20% less than the quality score of the reference light. The 20% figure is only an example, and that would be a parameter the user could set.
Jean
Hi Jean @jpiquette,
Thank you very much for your suggestion. We have on our issue/todo list noted that we will further improve this. For instance, now the % selector only uses APP's quality estimation. Going forward, you will be able to select which metric controls the % to stack and we will also allow new formula to put in for frame selection.
We will work on this after the 2.0 stable release.
Mabula
Hello Mabula @mabula-admin,
Just to be clear on what I am suggesting...The current % to stack refers to the % of the total number of lights. So if there are 200 lights available and I set the % to 80%, then 160 lights will be stacked. Thus 40 lights are rejected.
My suggestion is that a % threshold based on the quality score of the reference light be used to reject lower-quality lights. So in the above example, suppose the quality scores of 199 of the 200 lights are within, say, 5% of the quality score of the reference light, and just a single light has, say, a 25% lower quality score than the reference light. And suppose I set the threshold % to 20%. Then only a single light would be rejected in this example.
Jean
Hi Jean @jpiquette,
Thank you very much for clarifying that, I understand it. Basically it would mean that the % slider will work either absolute with the number of frames or relatively to the measured metric. I will add it to our open issue to make sure that we add this going forward as an option. Thanks,
Mabula
