15th Feb 2024: Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta29 released - macOS native File Chooser, macOS CMD-Q fixed, read-only Fits on network fixed and other bug fixes
7th December 2023: added payment option Alipay to purchase Astro Pixel Processor from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and other countries where Alipay is used.
I have been using APP on a 1 year rental, for just under a year. It is time for me to think about whether I stay with APP or move to something else. At the moment I am leaning towards something else. APP is amazing and I have really enjoyed using it, and would like to keep using it. But there are features that I need now, that APP does not provide.
I know there is a lot of work being done on performance, but in my opinion image quality and usability would be better development priorities, as they will help you retain users like me. I can always wait longer for processing to complete, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about functionality gaps in APP, other than move to another product.
My top five list of improvements are...
(1) Deconvolution - APP is just not able to extract the level of fine detail that other processing packages can, and the lack of a deconvolution module is a big part of this. The implementation of something like Richardson–Lucy deconvolution would be a significant improvement to APP. This is probably the single biggest gap compared to other products, and the thing that would most temp me to move to another processing tool.
(2) Comet Stacking/Integration - APP is pretty much unusable with comets without this. Even the free DSS has this feature.
(3) Noise tracking and management throughout the whole processing workflow. And the ability to manage noise locally, to avoid loss of detail in well exposed regions, while being able to smooth out colour noise (and retain colour information) in underexposed and background regions. I have been unable to extract usable colour detail from noisier background regions in APP, most of this information seems to be lost in the processing.
(4) Some sort of multi-scale transform, that allows you to deal with different levels of detail within your images separately.
(5) Improved tools for dealing with vignetting. I have not had any success using the vignetting tool in APP. It is simply unable to remove the vignetting from my images with the vignetting models it uses. What would be great is to have the ability to create and store digital flats (per telescope/camera), or to have something like the "Wipe" tool in Star Tools.
