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 6 hours of lights that unfortunately are about 2 stops over exposed. is there an easy way to batch them all and drop the exposure a bit?
@jaximages Hi John. Sorry to hear that your exposures are overexposed.
I am afraid that there is nothing that can be done about it. The pixels have the maximum value and it is unclear what the real value should be because they could have any value larger than the maximum allowed for a pixel. If the maximum value of a pixel is 65535 (16 bits) then the real value could be 65536 or 76543 or 98765 or whatever other value. And that will be different for every saturated pixel. So scaling down the images is not possible.
@wvreeven thank you i was kind of afraid of that. i was wondering if i could pre process in Photoshop, convert to .tif and stack those. i realize i will lose some data, just wondering if that would be possible, ie stack .tif files?
@jaximages Technically speaking that is possible.
But raw images contain metadata that APP puts to good use when processing the images and that metadata will be lost in the conversion to TIFF. Also, APP is written in Java and Java is picky about the TIFF format used so you need to make sure that the files are exported to the correct TIFF format before loading them into APP. You may need to experiment a bit before you encounter the right format.
thanx. i am going to go ahead and process what i have. i did quick median stack in PS (no calibration data) and there is something there, lol. ill Post a result and one of the original imagesÂ
