Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Hi, firstly I'd like to say I love this program, and my question might not be about this program so much as my imaging process. Here it is:
Over the last few imaging projects I have been working on getting better star color. I had issues with stars becoming saturated so last night while I was getting broadband data of the Soul Nebula, I dropped my exposures to 120s from 300s in order to make sure the stars were still colorful. Fast forward to today and I'm processing my image but once again, the brighter stars come out bright white with a bit of blue/green fringe. I'm imaging with a triplet APO, the ES ED80 by Explore Scientific, and the 071 MC PRO from ZWO. My image is an HaRGB combination with 6.25 hrs of HA data over 600s and 300s subs. As I said, the RGB subs were 120s.
Any help here is GREATLY appreciated as I'm almost to the point of tearing my hair out.
I've noticed the same thing. Same equipment, but a lot less star colour in my recent work.
During my last processing, I cranked up the saturation just to be sure there was *any* colour. There was. But I'm convinced it's quite different than it used to be. Without the saturation bump, they appeared all white.
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The strength of the luminosity component of each pixel influences how much color appears. If a pixel is too bright, it's not going to show much, if any, color.
In one of his video tutorials, Adam Block commented that if the luminance of a pixel is 80% of max or more, it is going to be hard for that pixel to show color.
So when you stretch your images, look at the luminance (brightness) of a pixel and try not to stretch it so hard.
If you are doing mono processing, look at the intensity of the stars in your L frame and again, try not to get it above 80% before combining with your RGB image.
Cheers,
Rowland
That explains a lot. Thank you!
