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 đŸ™‚
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 think I have heard that this is possibly coming, but for now, what is everyone using to review your images to weed out the bad ones. I know in PI they use a tool called blink. what is available so that we don't waste processing time on bad frames?
You get the quality score of each frame - sorted. Dump the poorer ones if you want. Also under Integration you can set the weight to quality which gives the least weight to the poorer quality images. Blink seems a backward step to whats already in APP.
I had been going through them after Analyse Stars, didn't even see the Quality dropdown in Integrate, which of the methods do you normally use?
If they are really bad I dump them after looking at the quality score. However, I often keep borderline ones because when you use the Quality Setting it weighs them on noise, star density, star size and star shape. So, they aren't treated equally when integrated.  I stopped using blink when I got APP. I really don't know why it has been requested as I think the APP way is superior especially if you use both methods.
You can also do the star analysis done when registering and when you get the star quality results in the list below, you can right-click on that list and then scroll to the graph options. Here you can plot various parameters against each other. We want to make this graph itself interactive if possible, but that’s not in yet. You can use it to see if it helps you making better selections.
I will give it a look Vincent
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