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.
I finally had some clear nights to try out my new astrophotography gear, moving from a mirrorless camera to a dedicated astro cam, new mount, guiding etc. I also purchased an Optilong l-extreme filter based on many favourable reviews. On my first night I took images of the Orion Nebula without using the filter - very happy with the results after processing in APP and Photoshop. Last light I used the same equipment on the same target but this time I added the l-Extreme filter, and what a difference it made. My question is can both sets of images be processed in APP and would the final image be an acceptable combination of the two, or worse than each individual processed image? I haven't tried that yet - will later on - but I'm interested in what others' experience with this is.
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Frank
@frank7777 Hi Frank. Happy new year!
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There are various ways to combine RGB and narrow band data in APP. If you search the forum for "extreme" (without the quotes) you'll find various posts in which I explain how to do that.Â
@frank7777 I had a search on the forum myself and found it hard to find a post that explains how to do this. So here we go: a workflow for processing L-eXtreme and RGB data.
- Go to tab 0 and select the Ha-OIII extract Ha algorithm
- Go to tab 1 and load the L-eXtreme data and their calibration data
- Go to tab 6 and click the integrate button at the bottom of the tab
- When the integration is done, return to tab 0 and select the Ha-OIII extract OIII algorithm
- Return to tab 6 and click the integrate button again
- Now you have two mono integration results: one with the Ha and one with the OIII data
- Return to tab 0 and select the Adaptive Airy Disk algorithm
- Go to tab 1 and clear all lights and calibration data. Then load the RGB data and their calibration data
- Go to tab 6 and click the integrate button again
- At this point you will have the two mono integration results plus the RGB integration result
- Return to tab 1 and clear all lights and calibration data
- Load the three integration results as lights and do not load any calibration data
- Go to tab 4 and click the register button
- Then still in tab 4 click the save registered frames button
- Return to tab 1 and clear all lights
- Load the RGB registered frame and again no calibration data
- Go to tab 2 and click the create Masters & assign to Lights button. This seems counterintuitive but it is necessary.
- Then still in tab 2 tick the split channels checkbox and click the SAVE (calibrated) Light frames button
- At this point you will have the registered mono Ha and OIII integration results plus the registered R, G and B registered integration results
- Now you can go to the Tools tab and combine the 5 registered integration results with the combine RGB tool by selecting the RGBHOO formula or take the 5 files outside of APP to another application to combine them.
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HTH, Wouter
