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 am having trouble with a OSC 3-panel integration of the Heart nebula. Process flow to date:
- Integrated each panel separately ... they look good - Loaded the 3 panels as lights - Performed Mosaic registration - Performed Normalization - Integrated the 3 panels
The result is as shown: a very noticeable difference in backgrounds between the 3 panels (shot across 2 nights).
Is there a way to fix this? Should I try to register, normalize and integrate all of the lights together?
OK, I may have fixed it. I did the above process again, but with the following changes:
- on Integration, changed Multi band blending to 15%, and set LNC from OFF to 6th degree, 3 iterations (I had LNC off before because I thought the scale of LNC was much smaller than panel size)
Which of these was the magic bullet, or both ? I think it is vastly improved but not quite perfect, are there other settings which could improve it? Â
Thanks, much appreciated! If interested, here is what I ended up with after a sort of HOO processing: (abut 72 minutes of light per panel, 130mm refractor)
Thanks, much appreciated! If interested, here is what I ended up with after a sort of HOO processing: (abut 72 minutes of light per panel, 130mm refractor)
Indeed, like Patrick @artaios indicates there are 3 settings that control how well the images blend.
1) normalize, advanced mode will work better then regular mode in this case for sure !
2) Multi-Band Blending is the main blend technique, so very critical to smooth difference in illumination between the panels. Setting MBB even to a higher % can result in more improvements in some cases.
3) Local Normalization Correction, is responsible to try to remove different gradients between the mosaic panels, so also adds to the mix to improve things.
