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.
Wondering if this is possible or something you've thought about adding. I want to shoot a mosaic with a full frame camera. The corners are not perfect at FF on my setup, it would be nice if I could somehow crop just like 5-8% off the left and right of each frame before integration and avoid it integrating the corners. This would still give me a much better field of view than a smaller camera but better result and not needing to cover a perfect FF field or merge the bad parts of the frame.
You can perform a crop on all frames if you want, is that what you're looking for? Tools menu -> batch crop
You can perform a crop on all frames if you want, is that what you're looking for? Tools menu -> batch crop
Does this work on raw data pre-integration? then I can load cropped fits and integrate/debayer fine as normal like it just came out of the camera that way?
I think so yes, I do have to say I never used that tools specifically as I always tend to just make the mosaic and then crop when required (I would advice that as well btw).
I think so yes, I do have to say I never used that tools specifically as I always tend to just make the mosaic and then crop when required (I would advice that as well btw).
To clarify my reasoning- it's the edges of the frames that are a problem so if you integrate a mosaic as is where the edges of each frame overlap there will be areas of bad stars/vignette which I don't want. I'm not trying to crop a finished mosaic I just don't want areas integrated with poor data. If you are overlapping parts of frame with not great data you will have a grid in the finished mosaic that is lesser quality stars. this can be noticeable on a lot of big mosaics if you look closely.
@xone Be very careful with this if you apply to raw data. It means that you need to crop your calibration data to exactly the same dimensions and exactly the same sub-frame as the lights otherwise you may run into problems with flat field correction.
I'm interested in this too. I have just started playing with mosaics, but I thought the best practice was to integrate the panels separately and mosaic the integrations as if they were lights. That means you could crop as much as you want as long as you leave enough overlap - and you don't have to worry about calibration problems as you would calibrate using the usual methods.
I only say this because I understood that a big mosaic might have thousands of frames and it is much faster to integrate the panes separately.
@xone Be very careful with this if you apply to raw data. It means that you need to crop your calibration data to exactly the same dimensions and exactly the same sub-frame as the lights otherwise you may run into problems with flat field correction.
Yeah good point I guess this is not such an easy solution then... it would be nice if there was an integrated functionality in the APP mosaic function to do this without causing issues or extra steps- just specify an X and Y crop factor before integrating
I guess you can calibrate your data, save the calibrated frames and then crop those? Saving of calibrated frames can be done in tab 2, all the way down.
