Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
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.
