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.
So if I'm doing something like M42 and have two sets of different exposures to accommodate dim nebulosity and areas so bright they'd put me past a full well, can I just throw those into integration and expect the result to somehow tone-map correctly, or do I have to produce two integrations and manually (e.g. Photoshop) mask in from each layer?
@rickwayne APP doesn't support HDR imaging yet. However, you can load all images into two sessions and let APP integrate per session. Then you can take the two integration results into an external tool and combine them.
Yep, that's what I usually do. Just wondered if there were some cool range-extending magic of which I was unaware. Mabula's sneaky that way 😀 .
@rickwayne Like I wrote, not yet 😉 An Mabula usually announces all new features when a release is done so he is less sneaky than you think.
I have a related question to this topic. If I were to integrate the different exposures in two sessions, is there a way to register them to make post-processing in a third party app easier?
So let's say I have a bunch of short exposures, but due to a flip or mediocre tracking my set of long exposures is not framed exactly the same way. Can I integrate each of those sets of lights independently but still register to the two sets with respect to each other?
@tbar23 Yes you can. After both integrations are done, you can load both resulting images as lights (don't load any calibration files) and then go to tab 4 and click the register button. Once done, you can click the "save registered frames" button and you're done. You could also opt to normalize them against each other in tab 5 and save the normalized frames.Â
@wvreeven Thank you. One more question here - in an attempt to better understand multi-session processing, I went ahead and added all of lights/darks to an appropriate session and applied my flats and dark flats to all sessions (4 in total). I finished calibration and am working on Analyze Stars.Â
However, if I think forward a few steps, I suspect I might have screwed up. I would like to integrate all 4 sessions separately with 4 independent final fit output files.
Can this be done?
@wvreeven Thank you. One more question here - in an attempt to better understand multi-session processing, I went ahead and added all of lights/darks to an appropriate session and applied my flats and dark flats to all sessions (4 in total). I finished calibration and am working on Analyze Stars.Â
However, if I think forward a few steps, I suspect I might have screwed up. I would like to integrate all 4 sessions separately with 4 independent final fit output files.
Can this be done?
would like to integrate all 4 sessions separately with 4 independent final fit output files.
Can this be done?
Yes, see the top 2 options in tab 6. The first one allows you to instruct APP to integrate per channel (i.e. per filter), to integrate all channels together or to do both. The second on is for the same but then per session.
would like to integrate all 4 sessions separately with 4 independent final fit output files.
Can this be done?
Yes, see the top 2 options in tab 6. The first one allows you to instruct APP to integrate per channel (i.e. per filter), to integrate all channels together or to do both. The second on is for the same but then per session.
I see that - perfect, thank you.
