[Sticky] Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta7 release notes

Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta7 release notes:

• IMPROVED & SPEEDUP Calibration Engine

  The whole calibration engine has been rewritten and improved to perform data calibration without any memory consumption nor data type conversions by performing all calibration workflows now using the lights and masterframe(S) databuffers from memory. This significantly improves calibration performance for APP. A typical dataset with calibration masters and Bad Pixel Mapping will be processed from calibration 2) to integration 6) in 10-25% less time. Bad Pixel Mapping used quite a bit of memory and had a small memory leak, this is completely gone now.

• IMPROVED MEMORY USAGE

  The internal memory controls have been adjusted further on our new development platform to have APP use less memory without loss of performance. Users should notice that APP will clearly use less RAM memory when compared to the earlier beta versions of APP 2.0.0. This should enhance performance, especially on computers with little memory available.

• IMPROVED FILE & DIRECTORY CHOOSERS (native choosers now!)

  We have replaced all the non-native looking file en directory choosers with native File & Directory Choosers so users can now select files using the Operating System file/directory chooser. This has been requested by many users and makes the chooser especially macOS friendly on mac computers. We also think that this eliminates all issues with the old choosers on windows 11 where some users experienced big delays when trying to load files. Please see the screenshot below for Windows, Linux and macOS:

• IMPROVED CONSOLE PANEL

  We have added the option to save the general console log. You can make a dump of the current log output, to a directory of your choice, which is present in the general console window. And you can also opt to save log files continuously to the Working Directory which will be 500 lines long. The detached Console Panel will now start after license verification instead of before the main APP window. We hope that this solves the issues with starting APP on some macOS Ventura installations, but we need a bit more confirmation to be really sure.

• FIXED normalization bug related to the Adaptive Pedestal in the calibration engine

  As reported in this topic https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/mosaic-failing-to-render-correctly/ there was a bug in the normalization engine related to the adaptive pedestal from the calibration engine. It was caused by not applying the exact same pedestal in normalizing and afterwards integrating the data. This is now robustly fixed.

• FIXED ICC COLOR PROFILES PNG,TIFF & JPEG file saving

  Adding ICC Color profiles to TIFF, JPEG and PNG files did not work correctly in the earlier 2.0.0 beta's. This is now fixed and fully tested with Adobe Photoshop 2023. The sRGB v2 legacy ICC color profile is set to be default ICC color profile, since many applications including Adobe Photoshop use this as the default working colorspace.

• FIXED PNG IMAGE SAVER

  A bug in the PNG image saver manifested itself when you tried to save a PNG file using the save button (below the histogram) while making a composite in the RGB Combine Tool. This is fixed. Furthermore, some metadata entries in the PNG header would show 2 times. This is also fixed.

• FIXED BUG TOOL OUTPUT panel

  When RGB Combine was started before the Remove Light Pollution Tool, a bug was triggered by the Tool Output panel. This is solved.