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.
While taking frames of the recent M100/Ceres conjunction, I found a good LRGB formula to use. Unfortunately as I worked with my frames, I discovered some of the subframes were slightly occluded by high clouds. This caused their color balance to be slightly off even if I used the same formula on every set. I color matched the combined LRGBs as best as I could, but it would be nice if there was a batch tool to do that.
One option could be to automatically choose the reference frame as the one with the least RMS value from the average of all frames, or let the user choose their preferred reference frame.
Then the tool would automatically compare the light parts of the frame above a user-silder for background cutoff, and try to automatically adjust the LRGB for each frame to match the reference frame.
I know it wouldn't be able to fix the light lost, but at least the frames would be similarly tinted and not vary red/green/blue with each set.
Thanks for a great tool.
