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.
Hi,
I stack up to 2-3000 frames sometimes including saving calibrated frames so I can get plain alignment on one shot color cameras. So I start to run out of my internal solid-state drive space even though I have a 2 GB drive.
Niw I have an external hard drive that’s fairly fast (200mb/sec 14 Tb drive) so I’m trying to decide which of these two scenarios is faster:
1) keep all the source files and write the the calibrated frames on an external hard disk and use the internal drive only for the integration working storage.
or
2) keep all the source files and space for the calibrate frames on the internal solid-state drive and use an external hard disk for the integration working storage.
I’m assuming option number one would be faster because I’m expecting the integration working storage to be worked a lot harder and that the source files are essentially only read once or a small number of times. Is my assumption correct?
@readyjetty If you're looking for performance during processing then simply copy all files over to your internal drive, process using the internal drive and copy the results back to the external drive.
I guess I should’ve been more clear: My internal drive is a very fast NVMe 2 TB SSD and cannot be upgraded and all the files and stacking procedures requires more than that.
So I either need to put them all on an external hard drive or split them and I’m asking if I split them should I use the internal very fast NVNe SSD as the working file space or for the source files, because I can’t use it for both.
This is just my thinking for your situation. If you had a smaller stack, say 100 light frames, then the performance difference would probably go unnoticed either way. But considering you have up to 3,000 light frames to stack, I think you would see faster results if your light subs were stored on the SSD and you did the final integration to your external drive.
That is a lot of light frames that APP will have to access individually, so over the course of the entire process, keeping the light frames on the SSD would seem to work better. Then if my thinking is correct, APP would only have to write one integration file to your slower external drive.
