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'm having a problem that I can't seem to find anyone else having from a search. I'm exporting my Z7 files as uncompressed TIFF files from photoshop and lightroom. I know that the recommendation is to use the RAW files, but I like to remove airplanes and satellites first in photoshop. When I load these lights and open them in the viewer, many of them have large interlaced bands on the left hand side of the image. Within the bands are very small interlaced lines.
I'm saving with no image compression, interleaved pixel order, and IBM PC Byte order.
I'm currently using 1.083 beta2, but had this problem with the prior version, too. It's done this with images that APP itself has saved as TIFF files. What's confusing is that it will do it for many images but not others with no difference in the workflow.
@nhmorgan79 APP is written in Java and TIFF support in Java is flaky at best. I will ask Mabula if he'd like you to upload a few of your TIFF files so he can see what the issue is.
Having said that, did you know that APP very well can get rid of satellite and airplane trails as well? Have you ever tried processing your raw files and tweaked the outlier rejection parameters in tab 6 if the defaults don't work? If you want we can help you do that so you won't need to do it manually anymore.
@wvreeven Thanks for the quick response. Would APP need more than one light frame per panel to remove those? I've been working on 85mm mosaics with about 60% overlap, but no two light frames are the same.
@nhmorgan79 Removing satellite, airplane and meteor trails is a statistical process and the more frames the better. I am not 100% sure but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work well with less than 5 frames per panel.
I've played around with it a bit more and it appears that on these files, if I load the star map, it appears to be working with the data just fine. They also seem to integrate ok, so it may be more of an issue with how it is displaying in the viewer. As a side note, as I tried this with 1.083 some of the files were failing to detect stars with the analyze stars tool or showing really low star counts (like around 100 for images with thousands). I reinstalled 1.082 and the analyze stars seems to be working just fine.
@nhmorgan79 Star analysis in 1.083-beta2 is flaky but if it works in 1.082 then it will work well in 1.083-beta1. Mabula is working on a fix for star analysis in 1.083 which is expected to be released soon.
