2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
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.
Hello. I am still struggling with APP as most of the YouTube clips and content here in the Forum is mostly geared towards monochromatic cameras and several filters combination. I have two questions: 1st: my AA creates a FITS and a JPEG for each frame. I have been sorting through my nightly haul and only loading the FITS files into APP. If I leave both files types in the Lights data, it seems to not look good, when I just use FITS, is still doesn't look right. Ideas? 2nd question, is there some setting I should be using for OSC images? As mentioned, all the help videos are made by LRGB mono folks. Thanks for the help-
The JPEG files from the ASIAir are just low resolution 'thumbnails' which can be used to quickly scan through your lights for detrimental things like satellite trails, clouds etc.. They should not be used to create images - for this you should stack the FITS files only.
Not sure what you mean by 'not look good' - maybe you could elaborate - but there should be no special settings required for OSC data (unless you use a DSLR data, when you may need to force the debayering in 'Panel 0 - Raw/FITS' - looks like this is not relevant for you). I routinely jump between colour and mono data and don't change any of the settings in APP.
Wonderful. Thank you
Hi Tyler @monsonmjmgmail-com and Jon @jdwood,
Tyler, thank you very much for posting your issue and welcome to the Astro Pixel Processor forum.
Indeed, like Jon mentions, the JPGs are only for previews, you absolutely do not want to use the JPGs for actual data processing. The JPGs are worthless in that sense because of the 8bit depth which causes the low lights to have no meaningfull information at all. The FITS will have 16bits depth.
Do the OSC images at least show some color when you view them in the image viewer in APP?
Are you loading calibration data as well? If so, did you try to only load lights and check that result? Is it better or worse?
Feel free to upload a screenshot from any issue you may suspect with your data 😉Â
Mabula
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I did have months of struggles with my 294. I just upgraded to a 2600 and the process is much easier. I finally got a stacked image! I was hoping there was some setting in APP where I could tell APP to ignore the jpegs in the Working folder, and I couldn't find anything. For the stack that finally worked, I went through the images one at a time to remove the jpegs; just seems there should be an easier way.Â
I now need to learn how to work the Tools features and the right-hand side post-processing tools.Thanks for the replies.Â
Tyler
There is a trivially simple trick for this that I use for Asiair images.
After I copy the files to my processing computer I open the folder (using file explorer or Qdir or whatever) and click the column header for file type. This sorts by type and groups the jpgs together. They can be selected and deleted in one go. Afterwards I revert to sort by name.
This is for Windows, but I assume other OSs have similar functionality.
JC
Excellent. Thank you
Hi Tyler and John,
You are most welcome Tyler, glad things are getting better now !
Thanks for helping out John !
Mabula
