Astro Pixel Processor 1.083 stable

All detailed release notes of all the 1.083 beta versions can be found here:

https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/release-information/astro-pixel-processor-1-083-preparing-next-release/

Since it took a long time to make this new stable version with many improvements and optimizations, we show the most important release notes here only. Otherwise the list would become too long...

• NEW STAR REDUCER TOOL, all the issues that were reported in the earlier beta versions were fixed. The huge memory consumption is gone and no more black areas in the result. Furthermore, the star reduction and background reconstruction has been improved a lot since the initial beta release with this tool. You will see very little artefacts on most images. The tool is also rather fast now! The interface of the tool has changed quite a bit during the beta phase and it has a proper tooltip now. This new version is producing great results on a wide variety of data. Images with very dense star populations are very difficult to star reduce or star remove, but the tool is handling it very well now we think. Images with dense star fields were very problematic in the beta2 release and we greatly appreciate all the problem data that we received to be able to address all the reported issues. Thanks a lot!

• NEW COMET REGISTRATION, all issue that were reported in the earlier beta versions were fixed. The code to detect the comet nucleus has been improved much from the beta2 code. It has also been optimized in terms of memory usage so it works better and more efficiently now. Furthermore, you can now skip an image if visual comet detection seems to fail, in that case the detection is done based on the detection in the other frames combined with calculating the speed of the comet relative to the stars if the time shot metadata is being used. By default you will need to visually select the comet in the final frame to make all calculations more robust and reliable. In the 1.083-beta2 version, the comet detection would sometimes lead to an endless loop which will no longer occur as well so that has been solved. Once the comet has been detected properly in 3 frames, the comet speed is calculated which leads to better detection and prediction of the comet in the following frames as well.

• NEW FILE SAVER MODULE INCLUDING PNG READ/WRITE  SUPPORT, DPI AND ADDITIONAL ICC COLOR PROFILES, file saving in APP has been completely upgraded. This upgrade is applied in the whole application where frames are saved and it should solve many requests regarding file saving in the application. It is used when masters are created, your light frame integration/stack, when you save with the preview filter and in all the batch tools. Especially in the batch tools, the file saver is new much more user friendly. You only need to set the save settings once for whatever file type that you choose and the batch will be saved in the same way, without ever asking file save settings again. The file saver now is just one panel that allows you to set all file save options which are, directory of choice (no more saving in only the Working Directory), file name of choice, file type (FITS/TIFF/PNG/JPG), bit depth (depending on the file type, 8/16/32 bits), ICC profile for TIFF/PNG/JPG, JPEG quality. The new file saver also includes the option to set Dots Per Inch (DPI, for printing purposes) for TIFF/PNG/JPG frames. Finally, the file saver includes many more ICC color profiles (no profile for linear data, sRGB v2, v4, ColorMatch RGB, Adobe RGB 1998, Apple RGB, Wide-gamut RGB, ProPhoto RGB) to use which can be needed for printing purposes, or for moving the non-linear data to other applications like Photoshop. Be aware that if your data is still linear, simply save your data without an ICC color profile. So you can also choose to not include an ICC color profile for TIFF/PNG/JPG when the data is still linear. (if you do save with an ICC profile on dark linear data, you will get issues with your data! ICC color profiles like sRGB, Adobe1988, ProPhoto etc... are not to be applied on linear data at all, they are for the non-linear color spaces).

• IMPROVED, HSL Selective Color Tool, the tool has been improved greatly. Previously, the tool had issues with objects with a high dynamic range in the center of the field of view. This has been solved. Furthermore, the sliders work more directly. Previously, if you would set of the sliders to 0,5 you would hardly see a change in the result. Now you will see changes much more quickly making the tool easier to work with. We have removed the luminance slider because it had no use really and would only lead to odd results. Finally, the user interface has been improved with buttons to see the color selection: "show color selection" so you can see the pixels that will be affected clearly before you make changes. This means that you can actually see the color channel mask for the selective color to be applied. There is a button to see the original image and there is a button to see the actual image on which you are working on the tool at that moment. Finally, the tool now has a proper tooltip.

• IMPROVED, 2)-6) MANY CODE OPTIMIZATIONS, due to optimizations in the modules 2)-6) overall speed increase has been accomplished of about 15-30% depending on the data and the computer which is being used. 3)Analyse stars and 5)Normalize are a lot faster now. 4) Is faster as well (especially when calculating mosaics which have significant optical distortion), but was already fast. 6)Integrate speed has been clearly improved as well. This shows CPU and memory usage for processing of a typical dataset using 31 CPU threads and 16GB of RAM:

• ADDED CAMERA SUPPORT USING LATEST LIBRAW 2021-10 snapshot: Canon EOS 1DX Mark III, R5, R6, M50, M2, 850D,M200. Nikon D780, Z50, Z5, Z6 II, Z7 II, Z fc. Sony DSC-HX99, DSC-RX0M2, DSC-RX100M7, ILCE-7RM4, ILCE-6600, ILCE-6100, ILCE-9M2, ZV-1, ILCE-7C, ILCE-7SM3, ILCE-1, ILCE-7RM3A, ILCE-7RM4A, ZV-E10. Panasonic DC-TZ91, DC-Z96, DC-GX880, DC-S1H, DC-S5, DC-GX7M3, DC-G90, DMC-FZ100, DMS-ZS60, DC-G110, DC-G100, DMC-GF2, DC-FZ10002, DC-TZ95, DC-GH5M2. Hasselblad H4D-50, L1D-20C. Olympus E-M1 Mark III, E-M10 Mark IV, E-PL10. Leica X2, SL (TYP 601), M9, Q (TYP 116), M (TYP 240), CL, M8, Q2, M10, DIGILUX3, D-LUX 7. Fujifilm GFX 100S, X-E4, X-S10, GFX 50S II. Pentax MX-1, K-3 Mark III.
• IMPROVED, MOSAIC REGISTRATION, the code to register all frames into the mosaic has been optimized leading to quite a bit faster mosaic registration.
• FIXED & OPTIMIZED, 2)CALIBRATE, the implementation of the adaptive pedestal is now faster and the calibration engine has a new warning system against data that has issues with sensor offset, ligh leakage, incompatible calibration data.
• IMPROVED, WORKFLOW in 3) ANALYSE STARS, 4) REGISTER, 5) NORMALIZE : you can now directly skip tabs 3), 4) en 5). This is usefull in the following cases:
  • Comet registration, by skipping 3) star analysis, you can directly perform comet registration using only the comet nucleus. You can also perform 1 star registration in this way, if you have data with very little stars. If you do have stars in your data, we recommend to perform star analysis, since APP will then perform comet registration after star registration, and this should and will give you better results in terms of precision.
  • Proceeding with already registered frames, skip 3) and 4) and proceed directly with normalization.
  • Proceeding with already registered and normalized frames, skip 3), 4) and 5) and proceed directly with integration.
  • Proceeding with alread normalized frames, perform star analysis and registration and then skip normalization to directly go to integration. 
    

    

    

    

     

• BATCH MODIFY TOOL HAS BEEN REPLACED BY 4 SEPARATE BATCH TOOLS, we have replaced it finally because it was a multi-function complicated user unfriendly tool. The different functionalities have now been made possible with the introduction of 4 new Batch tools: Batch Crop, Batch modify metadata/CFA, Batch add/multiply, Batch save which will be introduced below:
• NEW BATCH MODIFY FITS METADATA/CFA TOOL, the Batch Modify FITS METADATA/CFA tool allows you to save copies of your frames with corrected metadata for

• • • iso/gain
    • exposure
    • instrument (your camera name)
    • filter used
    • capture session
    • add Bayer/X-Trans CFA tag
    • remove Bayer/X-Trans CFA tag / undemosaic already demosaiced data

The following screenshots show an example where you can add the correct CFA tag for data that is missing the tag because the capture software did not include it...

•  NEW BATCH CROP TOOL, the Batch Crop tool enables you to make a crop of your data. You can draw the crop/rectangle and/or use crop offsets to finetune the desired crop. The crop dimensions and aspect ratio are shown as well.

• NEW BATCH ADD/MULTIPLY TOOL, the Batch Add/Multiply Tool enables you to add/subtract and multiply/divide the data in your images with a certain offset or factor.

• NEW BATCH SAVE TOOL, the batch tool enables you to save a batch of files to a different filetype and possibly change the bitdepth of the data as well. And you can apply the preview filter stretch to the saved data.

• IMPROVED BATCH ROTATE/RESIZE TOOL, we have updated the user interface of the tool and it now provides a quick preview when you touch the rotate, resize sliders or touch the flip selectboxes.

• FIXED, BAYER DRIZZLE WITH THE HA-OIII debayer algorithms, enabling bayer drizzle with the Ha-OIII extract Ha or extract OIII algorithms did not work correctly. It showed the exact same result which was similar to the Ha-OIII mono debayer algorithm. It now works correctly as is show in the next screenshots:

Bayer Drizzle with Ha-OIII mono (so mix of the Ha and OIII signals):

Bayer Drizzle with Ha-OIII extract Ha (only Ha):

Bayer Drizzle with Ha-OIII extract OIII (only OIII):

A HOO composite of these Ha and O3 signals made with the RGB Combine and Selective Color tools (data courtesy of Ian Barredo @tracer, asi533 Optolong L-Extreme filter):

• FIXED, SAVING CALIBRATED X-TRANS FILES IN 2) CALIBRATE, as mentioned in this topic: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/problem-saving-loading-calibrated-lights-from-fuji-x-trans-sensor/ , there was a problem with the X-trans CFA pattern when the calibrated X-Trans files were saved as fits files in the calibration engine. The problem has now been fixed.
• FIXED/IMPROVED, CALIBRATION MASTERS, by default, APP will now create 32bits Calibration Masters. On the forum a problem was reported with Flat-Field calibration causing rings in the light frame integration. It turned out the solution was to create 32bits calibration masters instead of 16bits calibration masters. With 16bits, severe posterization occured in the masters leading to bad data calibration. The issue is reported here: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/integration-causing-nasty-rings/

• FIXED, MACOS KEYSTROKES, macOS users can now use the Command key to do copy/paste/cut/select all in the whole application. For instance, in the File Chooser, you can use Command-A to select all files. In the console window, you can copy the console text and output it to a txt file. And, you can use copy/paste to enter your license details. Previously, these keystrokes were only possible with the multi-platform CTRL key. Now it also works with the MacOS command key.
• FIXED, FITSREADER, SUPPORT FOR FITS KEYWORD ROWORDER, we can now correctly read and apply the bayer patterns of images that have the ROWORDER keyword combined with the BAYERPAT, COLORTYP keywords.
• FIXED, USER INTERFACE GLITCHES ON WINDOWS SYSTEMS, as reported in several forum topics, some Windows users, especially with newer hardware, have reported crashes/glitches of the APP Graphical User Interface. One of these topics is: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/very-basic-problem-with-interface/ . We have fixed the problem by including the fix in the application installer to disable both Direct3D & OpenGL for the native Java JDK components. The solution was proposed by @bcolyn and it does seem to solve the issue completely we are happy to say.
• FIXED, FITS READER, APP's fits reader will now read FITS frames that hold multiple FITS HDUs where only the first HDU is the actual image data. This applies to professional astronomy data like from the Hubble Archive...
• WORK-AROUND IN FITS READER, FOR APPLICATIONS THAT USE A FAULTY FITS WRITER: some users reported problems with some FITS files where APP could not read these, but other applications could. The topic is : https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/camerasupport/invalid-fits-header-on-zwo-asi-178mc/ Some of the problem FITS files come from the Voyager capture software developed by Leonardo Orazi. Together with Leonardo, we have found the root cause of the problem. It turned out that the FITS writer code that is used in Voyager is a badly ported version of the nasa java fits library that we use in Astro Pixel Processor. The ported version is not following the FITS specification for how the FITS Header bytes should be filled with byte values once all metadata has been stored. So the root cause is not in APP, the root cause of the problem is in the capture software or the ascom driver that such a capture package uses. Leonardo has fixed this issue in Voyager and in APP, I have implemented a work-around so that this particular FITS issue is detected and the files are still read properly.