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.
My first attempts were just with the intervalometer on the camera, and I loaded raw, and it worked great.Â
However, I'm about to try (if it stops raining) using APT to shoot a session. It will output FITS, or I can save the files (without all the nice APT added info) on the SD cards and use raw.Â
While on the raw subject, Sony uses a compression algorithm that is lossy, not lossless (one of the few things I miss from Nikon). Compressed raw is 60 MB, uncompressed about 120MB, so it's a substantial difference, and in any terrestrial subject I cannot tell the difference. But for astrophotography I do not know how to assess. Does anyone know if it matters, or is that little extra data lost in the noise (literally)?
Final and related question, some people convert to DNG to compress, as that's lossless. I've never understood what the conversion to DNG does internally with the RGGB data itself, how much it is pre-processed, and whether that's a bad thing. I know you don't want to provide TIF's to APP, I saw that said clearly. But how about DNG's, do they matter, or are they just as good (but half the size if the answer is I really shouldn't do lossy compression)?
Sorry for all the questions, unfortunately they are all kind of tied together.
Linwood
I would never (personally) use anything that compresses or changes the RAW data in any way, loading the untreated RAWS directly into APP will always make sure you can let APP use its best algorithms for noise removal etc using the RAW bias, darks etc. Regarding APT I'm not sure what it produces myself, I have no experience with it, fits is fine usually, but you're less sure if the data is kept exactly the same (you'd have to check with APT for that). At least always try to use the same capture program.
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Thank you. Since posting this I found that (contrary to all experience in Nikon raw), the Sony camera also changes the raw data when you have lens compensation on, strongly so for compressed raw, weakly so for uncompressed. Someone on CloudyNights pointed me to a discussion on DPReview about this discover, so I need both off. Here's the DPReview (very long) thread. Â
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62199570
Just as an aside, I didn't discover this in APP, because it's so automated I never looked at a stretched dark or bias frame. I discovered it as I am also doing a trial of Pixinsight, and there you have to manually go through each step (and least I haven't learned otherwise).Â
So the wonderful set of defaults and automation in APP is a mixed blessing. 😀Â
I've read about the ASCOM drivers for APT for Sony, and SUPPOSEDLY they preserve the raw data. But I think I need to go through and see if they show any of these artifacts. However, for an unrelated reason, I may just skip APT for most use for now (namely that I can't use silent shutter with it; so long as I'm stacking 30sec or less, I get a LOT less vibration in the first 5 seconds or so by using the intervalometer in the camera and silent shutter.Â
Thanks again for the followup.
Ah yes, it can be a mixed blessing in that sense. You can start to "forget" to actually look at separate frames at some point (usually this is not a big issue when you have the setup working as-is), in APP you can always look at noise graphs and other parameters for your dataset after having done the normalization steps, right-clicking on the list below gives you that option. Not sure if that would've given you the same answers though.
And you're welcome! 😉
