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.
I am using an ASI 294 MC Pro. I typically take color lights using just a Sky and moon glow filter and Ha using a 12nm Ha filter. I've had good success combining them into an HaRGB image in photoshop. I have been using DSS but am trying the free trial of APP. I've had some success stacking and partially processing my RGB lights but what settings should I use to stack the HA lights?Â
I've seen several posts and videos about stacking Ha, R, G, and B together, about separating Ha from Ha-Oiii images, and stripping out Ha from some other type of image and how to combine your stacked Ha image with your RGB. But I can't find just the settings I should use to stack a bunch of Ha lights. I have the lights, flats and dark flats taken with the Ha filter and the darks for this camera/temp/exposure.Â
What settings should I use on 0 raw/fits and 1 load. (and any other that should be different from rgb lights.) Any help would be appreciated but please remember I am just starting out with APP.
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Taylor Blanchard
Hi Norman and thanks for trying APP!
At the moment APP is not able to immediately process narrowband and broadband together. You get to the normalization stage and then it has an error, because 3-channel RGB can't be properly normalized to 1-channel data. We are going to address that so it becomes a non-issue.
In the mean time, the best thing is to load in the RGB lights with the calibration data, go to tab 2, and split the calibrated channels (checkmark lower down in tab 2, then press "save calibrated frames"). You can do the same for the Ha data (extracted with the "extract-Ha" algorithm), add those as lights, add the calibration data to that and save those as well (deselect split channels). Now you'll have calibrated mono R, G, B and Ha frames. These can be loaded in as mono data in APP (without calibration data added as that was already done) and process them all the way to the end. You'll get fully integrated stacks of all these channels and these can be easily loaded in to the "RGBCombine" tool.
If anything is unclear, I'm happy to explain further.
Vincent,
Thanks for the response. It seems clear on how to combine the stacks.
However, I think my question was too general. Speaking just about Ha lights taken with a OSC camera using an Ha filter:
ON TAB 0
Do I still set pattern to RGGB?
Should I set algorithm to Ha?
Should I still check force Bayer/X-trans CFA?
ON TAB 1
Should I check Muti-channel/Filter processing?
ON TAB 2
Your response said to check split channels so that's clear.
Do any of the other tabs need settings different from OSC broadband stacking?
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Thanks!
Tab 0: If the header of your files contains the flag for the pattern, then APP will apply the correct one automatically. If not, only then would you need to do this manually. If you want to extract Ha from color data that was taken with a dual-/ tri-band filter, you select the "extract-Ha" algorithm. The force CFA is only to be used when you get a grayscale result, which happens when the header is not providing correct data to APP. Normally you don't have to change these.
Tab 1: Ony when you have data taken with various filters for instance, but as this is OSC data with one filter, it's not required. When you load in the mono data (R, G, B and Ha) you can leave this selected (as it is standard anyway, so no need to change there).
Tab 2: Yes and then calibrate and save the registered frames, also in this tab.
If you have all data in mono, so: R, G, B and Ha and you load these into APP and assign their filters (usually also done automatically), then everything can be set back to the standard settings. You can load the data in, go to tab 6 and press integrate.
Got it!
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Thank you so much!
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Taylor
