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.
Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta10 release notes
- FIXED & IMPROVED STAR DETECTION/ANALYSIS
Several users reported low star counts on some datasets relative to the older 1.083 version. This beta10 version should have this fixed now. Star counts will be much higher when compared to beta9 and we also have added a new option in 3) ANALYSE STARS: cosmic ray / noise reducer. This option enables you to disregard small-scale noise in your images like cosmic rays. It will help you to prevent that cosmic rays are mistaken for stars.
- FIXED read support for old Hubble Fits files
As reported in this topic https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/unable-to-load-many-lights-as-fits-files-from-mast/ APP could not read some of these fits files. This is now fixed.
- IMPROVED macOS DMG installer
We have adjusted the DMG installers for both intel and apple silicon platforms to show readable fonts in the DMG, a new background image and we changed the layout a little bit. We think this should make the install process a little bit more intuitive. The arrow indicates that you need to drag the APP icon to the Applications folder.
- IMPROVED GENERAL BUILD PROCESS for new and faster releases
We have added more build steps to our build script that we were doing manually still. This will make it a lot easier for us to provide new releases of APP more often. The installers will be automatically zipped with a preset naming convention per Operating System and architecture (macOS) and we have included Apple notarization and stapling the notarization ticket to the installer in the build process for the macOS installers.
