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.
Hello,
I'm currently trying to stack my first light images (Skywatcher Evostar 72ED) of M13. I have 100 lights and 30 darks and bias frames. The image quality is not very good due to the fact that I still waiting for my field flattener to arrive. To get something out of my images I only stack 70 out of 100 light frames but during the normalization process all 100 frames are processed. Why is this done if only 70 of them are used at the end? The quality score of an image is calculated during the calibration in step 2 so it is already there when the normalization process (step 5) starts and at the end (step 6) only 70 of my images are used for integration.Â
For me it could have saved 30% of the time the normalization step took saving about 15 minutes or so.Â
Maybe somebody could bring some light into this.
With best regards,
Mario.
The quality score does change when subsequent steps are processed, when APP knows more about the data because of those steps, things can change.
