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.
I am seeing a lot of blochiness and uneven gradients in my mosaic - this does not appear to be easily correctable (or at least I have not found any way in APP to fix it) Is there a suggested set of settings to resolve that?
Most likely, a lot of things that you refer to can be fixed/corrected in APP, but I will need to see the data. Can you upload an image or two showing the problems? And...
1) have you used a BPM in calibration?
2) in 6) integrate, have you used both MBB and LNC ?
3) Did you correct the individual mosaic panels for gradients first?
- I have already tried to use the 'Remove light pollution' on each, ( but they could probably be flatter) For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients, and giving a strange distorted result.
My settings:
1) - no didnt do a bad pixel map.
2) in 6 -I'm using 1st degree LNC, and 3 interations, although I played with this and added more, but it didnt seem to help.
I have just retried this again, after quitting out and restarting. The strange anomaly on the bottom right is gone, but the dark blotches remain. I don't see these gradients in the separate files, but perhaps they are there but just not as visible when the files are viewed?
- I have already tried to use the 'Remove light pollution' on each, ( but they could probably be flatter) For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients, and giving a strange distorted result.
My settings:
1) - no didnt do a bad pixel map.
2) in 6 -I'm using 1st degree LNC, and 3 interations, although I played with this and added more, but it didnt seem to help.
3) Yes I tried as best I could.
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Hi Tim,
I'll have a look at the 4 panels.
For some reason the mosaic tool is adding additional gradients
The actual mosaic registration will never alter the illumination of the data. A tool like LNC can however, because it tries to correct the illumination differences between the panels.
and giving a strange distorted result.
That will happen if dynamic distortion correction is unstable in registration. This happens usually when distortion correction is not really needed, but i'll try to figure out what's going on.
Done with APP 1.057 which is about to be released.
3) Analyse stars
To be able to have good registration of your mosaic, we want to detect more stars than for a non-mosaic situation. So I increased:
automatic minimum #stars target to 1000
automatic maximum #stars target to 10000 ( the amount of stars in your frames isn't very big, this ensures almost all available stars are analysed and used)
4) Register
change scale stop to at least 10 (this is needed for mosaics)
use dynamic distortion correction
disable same camera and optics
registration mode to mosaic
5) Normalize
set mode to advanced (for mosaics usually preferred)
6) Integrate
first I did an integration with default settings, only enable the normalization output map to see how data normalization is working.
I think that the initial distorted lower-right panel probably happened due to too little stars detected in 3) analyse stars with default settings. So for a mosaic, try to have more stars detected if registration is problematic. More stars means more registration points, making registration more robust. (On the other side, detecting more than 5000 stars in panels usually is overdone and will only slow down registration)
In a next post, I'll study the LNC + MBB correction on your data to make a nice seamless mosaic
Yes, I see that correcting the panels with LNC + MBB is a bit problematic.
Chances are that this is due to your Light Pollution Correction (LPC) on the initial panels, so it is worthwile if you could also share the panels without LPC so I can have a look at those to verify if that works better.
Anyway, this is what I get with LNC 2nd degree 10 iterations and MBB at 15%:
We see your problem, the black area. We also see that the normalization map shows that normalization is problematic, we expect it to be smooth, but it isn't. Data normalization is not working. To me, this could indicate that the initial Light Pollution Correction is not done properly and has introduced new gradients that are very unnaturel. I can only confirm this if I can have a look at the panels before Light Pollution Correction. Can you share those?
Dropbox File (Private or Invalid)
