May 27 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta45 has been released !
Fully Multi-Threaded LNC, many improvements for the registration engine, platform upgrade, and further tuning of internal memory consumption and memory release back to OS.
Apr 14 2026: Google Pay, Apple Pay & WeChat Pay added as payment options
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.
Hi,
What is the recommended way to non-destructively save a linear APP-image to continue image processing in another tool, like eg. PhotoShop or Affinity Photo?
Or put in another way, does saving a stretched image in APP always mean losing some of the original image information, and thereby limiting what can be achieved with further processing in other tools?
Currently in my workflow, I do the bulk of the processing in APP, (eg. Integrations, RGB combine and LPC) and after a light stretch, I save the image in a 32-bit TIFF format and continue tweeking the tiff-image in Affinity photo. Even though TIFF is a lossless format, I just want to verify if there is something to be gained from saving a non-streched image in tiff-format or even just use the the linear fits-file from APP directly as input to Affinity (which is an option). This certainly would require more work and your recommendations here would be very helpful.
Thanks,
Anders
Hi Anders,
Good question, I think stretching will remove data as the preferred way in APP is always to use the linear data. I asked Mabula for a double check on that. I'd say that if you can process linear in another package, I'd probably do that. But I'll see what Mabula has to say as well.
I’m still learning Affinity, but thus far I have gotten much better results when importing stretched tiff versus linear tiff.
I would be interested to hear your experience with linear files.
Yes, so you indeed do limit your data with stretching. However, it is a good starting point, usually, for touch-ups in another package as the stretching APP does may be somewhat better. But, if the other package is able to stretch, you can always compare both and try to make them produce the same result. If that works, I'd likely do that and then save the result in the other package to a stretched one.
Thanks Vincent and Jeff for your input.
After some further tests and comparisons, I tend to agree with you. Loading a linear fits-file and stretching it in Affinity, I have found it difficult to even come close to the result I’m able to achieve quite easily in APP.
So revising my thinking, it may be a good idea to make the most of APP stretching facilities that applies to the whole image before exporting to a tiff format. Importing it into Affinity is still very useful to be able to take advantage of powerful generic image processing features like layering and masking for further enhancements.
I do not use APP for any post processing. I create the stacks in APP and then combine and process the .FIT files in another piece of software.
