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-beta22 release notes
- IMPROVED Memory Usage
Further tweaks have been made for internal memory usage using Oracle GraalVM JDK 20 after extensive benchmarking. Memory should be lower and more stable giving more data throughput while latency is also managed well.
- IMPROVED MASTERFLAT CREATION SPEED 2-3x
MasterFlat creation and analysis from a batch of flats was rather a slow part of APP compared to the other processing steps from 2) Calibrate to 6) Integrate. So we have now optimized the loading of flats, analysis of flats for normalization and the final masterflat analysis. This leads to a significant boost of processing speed. The actual masterFlat creation is about 2-3x faster now depending on the image size and the number of flats. For a complete processing path from 2) Calibrate to 6) Integrate, APP will now only take about 70-85% of the time that was needed before. So you can argue that APP is about 1,2 - 1,35x or 20-35% faster roughly as a consequence when you process a dataset including flats. The actual performance gain does depend a lot on the amount of flats and the image dimensions and cpu threads in the system. This was tested with both OSC and well as monochrome data.
- FIXED 0) RAW/FITS settings behaviour, especially Bayer/X-Trans algorithm
Beta20 and beta21 had a regression bug on the Bayer/X-Trans algorithm setting. If you changed it, you were forced to restart at 3) Analyse Stars instead of 5) Normalize. For data shot with dual, triple, quad narrowband filters, this was very inconvenient because extraxt Ha and extract O3 integrations were not registered correctly out of the box. This is now fixed again. If you change the demosaic algorithm you only need to restart at 5) Normalize and thus you will preserve registration parameters. Only if you change the demosaic algorithm to or from Super Pixel, you will be forced to restart at 3) Analyse Stars because then it is vital to do so.
- FIXED, save Multi-Band Blending (MBB) % setting
The setting was not saved and thus restored when you restart APP. This is fixed.
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