UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
I have way too much Orion data and an auto HDR mode would be amazing.
Make it to where you have over in the stretch selections where you add in maybe an HDR 1, HDR 2, HDR 3. Maybe make HDR 1 to where you have it blending highlights in a way that clipping doesn't happen, but where you still see detail. HDR 2 where it does it on darker areas to lift them to a certain level so no blacks are clipped and the faint stuff shines through. Make these almost like stacking some of the stretch levels.
HDR 3 would be the one where it gets both highlights and darks pulled back and pulled up to stop any clipping on either side, with maybe a few variations on this one where you get a higher floor for darks and a lower ceiling for highlights with each level, or maybe even pull this into a tool and use sliders to do this and allow the image to retain the detail on each end.
I know this would make Orion season awesome, and can you imagine what you could do with it pulling details on dust, nebulae, etc. while not having your stars overpower the image? How about bringing up that IFN and galaxy detail without killing galaxy cores like on M81, or even bringing out an amazing M31 with details all the way to the core and details all the way out in the extended halo around it.
Of course it would be even more awesome with a noise reduction module, but with some of the tools I have in Photoshop and PI I can already handle the noise pretty well.
You're on a roll! Nice. 🙂 Yes, HDR is on our to-do list and I think it would be very nice to have these kind of presets then as well, which would be in line with how other tools in APP also work.
Since I use APP so much I always keep in mind some features I'd like to see in it. I think this one is my biggest on the wish list.
