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.
Right now, you can do multi-channel/filter integration per channel. But your options for stacking is limited to an overall number of the total images to integrate. So, for instance, I shot three filters on an object, 24 hours of total time. After running the quality graph, I need to only use about half of the frames to get the best overall image quality.Â
The slider that exists today does allow me to reduce the number of frames to half based on quality. However, most of my poor frames were the OIII filter which is typically set to blue, and is not very high contrast. But since OIII were some of my worst quality frames, when I reduce down the number of total frames to integrate, I lose most of my OIII frames. And end up integrating 4-5 hours of HA, 2-3 of SII, and less than one of OIII.
I would like per filter adjustment of how many lights to stack, so I could use 50% HA, 50%SII, and 50% OIII or some combination that nets me more OIII overall. This at least gives me more overall control over the quality and final image.
Â
Edit by Mabula: duplicate of
https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/lights-to-stack-75/
I concur. My LRGB lights were left with very few blues after selecting 75% to stack in the Integration module. Until a resolution is found I suggest manually "weeding out" the very worst lights in each channel, and then selecting 100% with weight=Quality. APP will add the poor quality frames to the stack but will assign a very low weight. I experimented and could not find a noticeable difference between it and another stack that was constructed after manually inspecting each light frame under magnification and removing them.
So you could try to register all frames to each other, save the registered frames and then go and process each narrowband-data separately. Then you can use that slider like you intended and in the end stack everything together again.Â
So you could try to register all frames to each other, save the registered frames and then go and process each narrowband-data separately. Then you can use that slider like you intended and in the end stack everything together again.Â
Yes, I agree. There are workarounds. The version I propose would enable you to do it in one go after setting all parameters.
Alternatively you could just process each filter by itself stacking only the number of desired frames, then register only the stacked/integrated images to each other.
Ah right, yes it could be made more clear maybe, something @mabula-admin will have a thought about as well I guess.. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hi @lead_weight, @oopfan, @vincent-mod
Thank you for sharing this.
I have added this to my worklist to include/fix this 😉
It was also discussed in this thread:
https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/lights-to-stack-75/
Kind regards,
Mabula
