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.
I have been getting much better in the past couple of weeks, all is good now 🙂 !!!
I have also managed to finally release 2.0.0-beat47 after many testing. It is a big culmination of much work on different parts of APP. It is quite a bit faster again !
Skye, I have fixed the RGB Combine issue with the luminance injection that was bleaching the colors. It works now much better and like you indicated it should. Please try it and let me know if you like it! I will make a new youtube video for it as well.
And please check the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch preview of your data in beta47. I think this new preview panel is a major improvement over the old preview panel with complicated stretch options.
Happy with your recovery! now I'm waiting for the video on Youtube (hoping that the artificial intelligence will translate verbally into Italian as I've seen lately in many foreign videos) for the news of the program
You can already get up to speed by reading the release notes that I am currently updating... The new preview stretch filter is explained shortly there already 😉
Excellent thanks!..I took a look and downloaded the beta 47 (it overwrote the 39 I was using and I was happy)..now I'll have to try the changes with a photo, tonight if the weather holds up, I'll go on an outing in the mountains, even though the session will be short I'll try the new version, which at the moment without trying it seems more difficult to me, and the DDP button has disappeared
@mabula-admin Wow, thank you, this is a gift. I will try it out soon.  You're lucky weather here was off last few months, (New Mexico) which is quite unusual for here. There weather is starting to clear now and I'll definitely try new features and let you know.
I am EXTREMELY happy to hear that you are healing/healed and your strength is back. I wish you the very best health going forward, you have give the community so much !!!!
I am also happy that all is okay now, it has been a very difficult and frustrating couple of months, but it is behind us know. I am also glad that beta47 is out, so please try it and let me know what you think about all of the new improvements. A couple of bugs have been reported, so I am working now to solve those. Beta48 will be soon there with all the fixes. If that then is fully stable. 2.0.0-stable and a full manual will be the next step !
Glad to hear. I would say the LRGB is a lot better though color seems overly exposed, might want to make sure you're strictly following the formula for not showing L as white, but instead using L as the proportional intensity for each color (only) as for example New R = L * ( R / (R + G + B)), and so on for each of 3 colors only. L's only contribution is to boost the colors is not shown itself.Â
ALSO I've been using HOO mostly and its good, feels colors are more "electric" and brighter but so bright they "wash out" and less detail is there.Â
I'd say in general colors (this is all mono mixing) are "too bright" and wash out detail (need to be turned down) but I don't see how to to do that, and I didn't have to do that before.Â
For both, the Red is just so intense some of its detail is gone, its just goes flat. These are all HOO examples on 47.Â
Thank you very much for your feedback. Did you look at the youtube clip for the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch?
Did you play with the color preserving slider? For broadband RGB data, the color preserving addition is huge. The colors are much better in nebula and the stars. But for not-broadband data, especially narrowband data combinations like we make in RGB Combine, you will need to lower the color preserving slider, maybe even set it to 0.
In addition, i completely rewrote all the RGB combine calculations and I can assure you that it is now doing ratio scaling of the luminance similar to what you indicate. We use proper luminance and not (R+G+B) for instance.
How the colors come out have to do with background subtraction in addition to the color preserving aspect of stretching the data.Â
Can you check or let me know how things are for you in RGB Combine when you set the color preserving slider in Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch to zero?
Thank you so much, well i did the HOO this morning on 48, actually its HHO (R/B, G). Looks pretty good, a little grainy but that's on me. This is NGC6618, which I call the Little Elephant.Â
I was happy to see there was a change to the LRGB combine tool but I have a question for you. I was trying a little experiment. I took one night's worth of data with my 183MC Pro camera and processed and split into RGB channels. I then took a night's worth of data with my 183MM Pro camera and processed. I then used those photos to try an LRGB photo. Everything looks good except for the sky background. It appears to have blue speckles all through it ( at least I think so, I am color blind ). Here are a couple photos of the OSC data and the LRGB combine data. I tried adjusting the sliders in the new stretch section but with no luck. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
Yeah i tried the combine LRGB under v48 too, as you said background is too light. However, the tool looks much improved.  Move background slider helps as here, though it should come up darker. So happy to see this LRGB combine getting in shape, so i don't have to go to other tools.Â
I was happy to see there was a change to the LRGB combine tool but I have a question for you. I was trying a little experiment. I took one night's worth of data with my 183MC Pro camera and processed and split into RGB channels. I then took a night's worth of data with my 183MM Pro camera and processed. I then used those photos to try an LRGB photo. Everything looks good except for the sky background. It appears to have blue speckles all through it ( at least I think so, I am color blind ). Here are a couple photos of the OSC data and the LRGB combine data. I tried adjusting the sliders in the new stretch section but with no luck. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
I think that you refer to the color noise in the sky background, right? I see it in the second image which is the LRGB, right?
What kind of formula did you use? Just one of the preset LRGB presets? Could it be that with the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch you had the Color background threshold at zero and saturation not at zero and thereby injection color noise in the sky background? Or is the L layer not of good quality somehow?
If you want me to have a look, then please upload the  L,R,G and B channel here and I will check it myself:
Yeah i tried the combine LRGB under v48 too, as you said background is too light. However, the tool looks much improved.  Move background slider helps as here, though it should come up darker. So happy to see this LRGB combine getting in shape, so i don't have to go to other tools.Â
Can you be more specific, because I do not understand fully what you are saying and referring to.
"as you said background is too light"
Why is it too bright? What is your reference? The data is still linear I assume that you load into the tool. Maybe the Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch makes it too bright in your opinion? You can simply set the background slider lower I would think?
" Move background slider helps as here, though it should come up darker."
I think you refer here the background slider controls in the RGB Combine Tool, right? moving left makes a channel go brighter and to the right makes a channel darker. You move the sky background of that channel in that way. Â Maybe it is counterintuitive how the slider works?
I have uploaded the photos for you to take a look at. Folder -Â Tom-LRGB-colornoise. This was my process. I stacked the OSC data, ran light pollution correction, and star color correction. I then separated that into the RGB channels. I then stacked mono data and ran light pollution correction. I then registered those four photos and ran RGB combine with the LRGB 1. I did do the combine RGB again to fiddle with the sliders but I could not get anything to fix it.
@mabula-admin Yeah the Color Preserving Slider helps, suggest maybe have it default to zero, because at 20 the Red is just totally maxed and there's not detail in that color. Zero might be "too far" but definitely turning it down does reveal less over saturation and more detail.
I have uploaded the photos for you to take a look at. Folder -Â Tom-LRGB-colornoise. This was my process. I stacked the OSC data, ran light pollution correction, and star color correction. I then separated that into the RGB channels. I then stacked mono data and ran light pollution correction. I then registered those four photos and ran RGB combine with the LRGB 1. I did do the combine RGB again to fiddle with the sliders but I could not get anything to fix it.
Thanks for taking a look at these, Tom
Hi Tom,
Great, I have added it to my issue list to have a good look at your data. I will get back to you 😉
@mabula-admin Yeah the Color Preserving Slider helps, suggest maybe have it default to zero, because at 20 the Red is just totally maxed and there's not detail in that color. Zero might be "too far" but definitely turning it down does reveal less over saturation and more detail.
Okay that is good feedback. I did notice this on some of my own test data when running the RGB Combine Tool with narrowband data. I will think about how to implement this best. The simplest way is to default Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch (ADSS) with Color Preserving at 0 when starting the RGB Combine Tool. And have the default setting for color preserving at 0 as well when running RGB Combine. So if you hit the reset button or click 2x on the color preserving slider, it goes to zero. Would that work well? I will give it some thought in the coming days.
Your suggestions for improving luminance injection caused me to actually redesign all the internal formula. So all the calculations are improved even without using the L slider.
So it also means that all the preset formula that are in the RGB Combine Tool, actually now give different results in terms of color depending on the actual data as well.
My suggestion to try now is the following: if previously the HOO formula was working well, but now the H is too red, simply reduce the H's channel multiplier, or increase the multiplier of O's channel. That actually should also help and maybe then the color preserving slider has an actual positive advantage here as well to get good color and maintain your details. I will also add that to my testing. Â
Once we are clear on this, I might add additional formula that take into account color preserving or not.Â
Finally, it will ask possibly for more improvements for RGB Combine and then also a dedicated new YouTube video explaining everything.
@mabula-admin Okay I'll keep trying that. If you can see my Helix above in HOO, that was on 47, and to me just about perfect (without touching any controls), but on 48 yeah its coming in too overexposed. I try some of these ideas thx.
Hi Mabula, glad you're doing better and able to make good progress on your software. I have used APP since 2020 with great results, but I was somewhat surprised at my first image result using Beta 48, after upgrading from Beta 46. I agree with previous comments that my reds were very oversaturated using the new version. I was able to tweak the image after watching your video. I will try to upload the same image using Beta 48 and Beta 46, shot with ASI2600MC Pro and RASA 8, with IDAS NBZ UHS...
Below are the two images, saved as jpeg since I could not upload the FIT file. Curiously, when I open the oversaturated FIT BETA48 file in the ASIFITS Viewer it doesn't appear completely oversaturated as it does within APP. I was able, after trial and error , to get the oversaturated image to improve and resemble the Beta 46 result. Would there be a way to save the Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch settings from one session to another so that one would not have to start from scratch when a new image/session is loaded? (I see you have discussed possible modifying default settings which would address the same situation.) Thanks very much. John
