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Good evening everyone,

today was actually a good day. I keep making great progress and with every version I think I'm pretty close to the optimum regarding the formulas and their implementation. Butas it goes — something always comes to mind.

So here's tonight's revised version, mostly polished on quality:

The sliders are slimmed down — Sharpen + Structure are now one Detail slider. Instead of 4 color sliders there's Color Punch + Color Smooth. Wavelet + TGV → BG Smoothing. 5 fewer sliders overall without losing control — power users can still drive legacy values via presets, but the UI is finally uncluttered.

The palette mask now runs invisibly in the background — as soon as you've done star separation, only the nebula gets the palette colors, the sky stays natural. I tried this before with toggle buttons + brush tool, was all too complicated. Now: just star separation → done. Works cleanly on faint extended targets too — Christmas Tree, Veil outskirts get the palette, not just the bright center.

Auto-update checker is in — 30 sec after launch the app checks for new versions. If there's a newer one, a dialog pops up with release notes and a download button. You don't need to manually check GitHub anymore.

Small things that were bugging me:

- AUTO gradient was always 60 regardless of the image — now scales naturally from 5 (clean) to 90 (heavy mosaic)

- Pulling sliders back sometimes did nothing because legacy values stayed stuck — fixed

- Tone curve was dropping drag events during long renders — fixed

- Sharpen slider at 90 = trashed image → soft-knee limiter above 50, no more crash look

- Christmas Tree and similar faint targets only got palette on the bright center — better object mask via starless layer

- Found 124 missing translations + filled them in (DE/EN/FR/ES)

I re-tuned the galaxy AUTO values against a PixInsight reference of M31 — HDR cap up to 60 instead of 35, star reduction 22, HSL selective now defaults to Cyan+15/Orange+15/Green-15 for galaxies. One click on AUTO Detail + AUTO Expert + AUTO HSL should land closer to the pro look than V1.1.33.

Existing licenses: just install over the top, your settings stick.

Good evening everyone!

Original text: only AI used for formatting

Over the past few days, I've put in a lot of hard work to be able to present this version V1.1.30 to you. Here's an overview of the most important changes:

1. Loading & Stretch Options

When loading, all common stretch data is now offered – giving you maximum control over the image.

Important: The loaded data is used for star detection. I personally always think dark images look cool – but they're not much use if the star detection ends up working suboptimally.

Quick switch of stretch method: If the image is already loaded and you still want to quickly switch to a different stretch method – no problem. Just click the "Original" button in the top right, and you'll be taken straight back to the respective menu.

1. Star Detection & Star Separation

To optimize star detection, I've expanded the Gaia database. The logic behind star separation has also been significantly improved once again.

Tip: If the core burns out after star separation, it helps to adjust the brightness to find the optimal point.

I've built in nearly dozens of algorithms to reliably separate the core – so it should really help.

1. Auto Mode for Beginners & Pros

The program is meant to be easy for beginners and highly professional at the same time. That's why I've added an auto mode: it provides suggestions, so to speak – the fine-tuning is up to you.

1. Pipelines & Bug Reporting

All pipelines have been thoroughly tested. But there are bound to be some bugs left – if any come up, no worries:

In the top right, next to the fullscreen mode, you'll see a bug icon. Just click on it and post on Reddit – I'm usually quick to respond.

1. New Features in the Top Bar

Please take a look at the bar in the upper middle – new features have been added there as well.

1. Performance Indicator During Layer Editing

Due to the file size of some images, the program requires a lot of computing power. When the individual layers are being edited, short delays are unavoidable – despite the render pipeline having been optimized multiple times.

New: These delays are now visibly shown in the sliders, so you always know what's happening in the background.

1. Manual & Tutorial Videos

I'll be updating the manual step by step, and I'm also planning short tutorial videos:

• Kept small (only 6–15 MB)
• Available in multiple languages

A Personal Word to Wrap Things Up

It's awesome how much you've supported me – thank you for all your feedback!

And honestly: what you're seeing today is the program I wanted to have myself.

As a thank-you for your support, I've extended the trials by one more week – unfortunately, this will be the last time.

Have fun with the new version!

And Yes ... Mac / linux aare on the Roadmap

Guten Abend zusammen!

Original Text : nur Ki zur Formatierung benutzt

Ich habe in den letzten Tagen wirklich viel und hart gearbeitet, um euch diese Version V1.1.30 präsentieren zu dürfen. Hier die wichtigsten Änderungen im Überblick:

1. Laden & Stretch-Optionen

Beim Laden werden jetzt alle gängigen Stretch-Daten angeboten – das gibt euch maximale Kontrolle über das Bild.

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Schneller Wechsel der Stretch-Methode: Falls das Bild bereits geladen ist und ihr trotzdem schnell eine andere Stretch-Methode wollt – kein Problem. Einfach oben rechts auf den Button „Original" klicken, und ihr seid sofort wieder im jeweiligen Menü.

2. Sternerkennung & Sterntrennung

Um die Sternerkennung zu optimieren, habe ich die Gaia-DB erweitert. Auch die Sterntrennung wurde hinsichtlich der Logik nochmals deutlich optimiert.

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Ich habe hier fast Dutzende Algorithmen eingebaut, um den Kern zuverlässig zu trennen – es sollte also helfen.

3. Automodus für Einsteiger & Profis

Das Programm soll einfach für Anfänger und gleichzeitig sehr professionell sein. Deswegen habe ich einen Automodus eingebaut: Dieser liefert sozusagen Vorschläge – die Feinarbeit liegt bei euch.

4. Pipelines & Bug-Reporting

Sämtliche Pipelines sind sauber durchgeprüft. Fehler gibt es aber bestimmt trotzdem noch – falls welche auftreten, kein Problem:

Oben rechts neben dem Vollbildmodus ist ein Käfer-Symbol zu sehen. Einfach draufklicken und bei Reddit posten – meistens bin ich schnell.

5. Neue Funktionen in der oberen Leiste

Schaut bitte auf die Leiste in der Mitte oben – auch dort sind neue Funktionen eingefügt.

6. Performance-Anzeige bei der Layer-Bearbeitung

Das Programm benötigt aufgrund der Bildgröße einiger Dateien sehr viel Rechenleistung. Wenn die einzelnen Layer bearbeitet werden, kommt es – trotz der mehrfach optimierten Render-Pipeline – unausweichlich zu kurzen Verzögerungen.

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7. Anleitung & Tutorial-Videos

Ich werde die Anleitung nach und nach aktualisieren und plane zusätzlich kurze Tutorial-Videos:

• Klein gehalten (nur 6–15 MB)
• Multilingual verfügbar

Ein persönliches Wort zum Schluss

Cool, dass ihr mich so unterstützt habt – danke für eure Feedbacks!

Und ehrlich gesagt: Was ihr heute seht, ist das Programm, das ich selbst haben wollte.

Zum Dank für eure Unterstützung habe ich die Trials wieder - aber leider auch letztmalig - um eine Woche verlängert

Viel Spaß mit der neuen Version!

Hey !

Here is the new update 1.1.26 — it features now different stretch formats that will give you absolute control over how your linear FITS data gets compressed for editing. When you load a stack, a dialog opens with a live 800-pixel preview and three sliders (Black / Mid / White, 0.01 step for fine-tuning) plus a method picker:

The four stretch methods

1. Arcsinh (Standard)

The PixInsight/Siril-style color-preserving GHS stretch. Logarithmic-like compression with a noise-aware MAD black point and per-channel chromaticity preservation — bright stars keep their color instead of going white. The Mid slider modulates the stretch curvature target. Best default for almost all deep-sky stacks.

2. MTF / Auto-STF

Midtone Transfer Function (the same curve PixInsight's auto-STF and Siril's auto-stretch use). Sigmoid-shaped — strong shadow lift at low Mid, gentle highlight roll-off. Use when Arcsinh feels too soft and you want PixInsight-style punch.

3. Linear

Pure histogram pull — no tone curve at all. (pixel - black) / (white - black), then clip. Use this when your stack already has good contrast (vendor-pre-stretched data, processed exports) or when you want maximum control over a manual curve later. Mid slider is greyed out (no midpoint to set).

4. Histogram-Pull (Histo)

Identical to Linear semantically, but the slider feel is calibrated to operate directly on histogram percentiles. Sometimes more intuitive when you want to tell the app "clip the bottom 2% and the top 0.1%" — drag Black to 2, White to 99.9.

Live preview + AUTO

A 540×76 histogram with stretch-threshold guides (black + white as dashed lines) updates in real-time as you drag. The ✨ AUTO button resets to MAD-black + p99.8-white + auto-mid — the legacy default heuristic — for one-click sane starting point.

Re-pick the stretch any time

After loading, click the green ORIGINAL button under Configuration to re-open the same dialog and try a different method without re-loading the file. (3-second press-and-hold on the same button still does the legacy "reset to base 0" if that's what your muscle memory expects.)

Check it out at Astroforge.de

Free Trial for 7 days :)

Hi guys!

Hope you're having a nice evening — here's the promised tutorial on how I edit my pictures with the new V1.1.19.

(Original written in German, then refined + translated with AI help.)

⚠️ Heads-up first

While recording this video I caught a WYSIWYG render bug — preview didn't perfectly match the final export on heavy sharpen/structure settings. Already fixed. Same V1.1.19 build, just re-download from astroforge.de or GitHub.

Bonus: every expired trial got reset → 7 fresh days for everyone.

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7-step workflow

1 — Rotate first Before anything else, rotate to your preferred working position. For landscape captures I flip to wide — more visible detail, especially with side panels collapsed. Tip: rotate at the very start. You can rotate later, but then all snapshots (Original, Denoised, Separated) have to be re-rotated in sync — eats time and compute.

2 — Pick a palette This is the single most important visual decision in the program. Top right has the palettes. I usually stay on Original or Natural, but try Hubble, Foraxx, HOO etc. — each gives the image a completely different character.

3 — Green cast + Denoise First the green-cast slider — value 1 is usually enough for clean stacks (5–10 if your sky was heavy with light pollution). Then Denoise: for noisy stacks I go 75–85 by feel; for cleaner data 50–60 is plenty. Visible improvement right after this step.

4 — Prepare for star separation Now I use the Resharpen (Nachschärfen) slider, again by feel. The point: the cleaner the star PSFs in the input, the more precisely DarkStar can separate them from the nebula. Then I click Separate Stars and after a short wait the stars and nebula sit as independent layers. I also try the palettes again here — they often make a very different impression on the nebula layer.

5 — Background The BG-Clip slider darkens the background. You may still see small inpainting artifacts where stars were removed — I'm training a dedicated ML model to take over that job. The current fill logic is Python-based, so it can't cover every edge case yet.

> ⚠️ Important: From step 4 onward, every slider you touch > acts only on the nebula layer. Stars stay untouched.

6 — Detail work Sharpen and Structure in V1.1.19 are rebuilt on a 5-scale à-trous wavelet — same algorithm AstroSharp and PixInsight MLT use. Filaments come alive without the grain blowing up like in older versions.

7 — Final tuning The remaining sliders: HDR, Local Contrast, Saturation, HSL-Selective per color band (8 hue bands), and the new Tone tab with ✨ AUTO button (one-click histogram analysis sets all 4 tone sliders). Hover any slider for an inline tip.

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There's heavy ML inference behind every slider tick — so be a little patient, especially on mid-range hardware.

Hope this helps ! And agaain thank you for your support and comments ! I read all of them :)

Good evening everyone!

First of all, I want to thank you for the incredible support, and also everyone who sent me error reports or their FITS files for testing. Every single one of those has made the program significantly better than I ever imagined.

Thank you again as well for all the orders so far. My dream was really just to sit somewhere on a summer evening with my family and observe the stars. That part works pretty well… but the images were just terrible. And because I have a family, I usually don't have time to process everything either.

So I started building Astroforge.de — honestly, more out of frustration than anything else. I have 39 years of experience in graphic design and programming. It didn't go as planned… what was supposed to be a one-week project has now turned into 9 months :). In the beginning I thought it wouldn't be that hard — at times my head nearly exploded from all the formulas and figuring out how to apply them correctly.

Especially over the last few days I've been working non-stop on the program. My vision is to offer the best possible product with the best possible quality — and it should be easy to use. So I've reworked the entire pipeline once more and integrated a custom-trained narrowband ML model! Today I also optimized the star separation workflow. I'm very proud to present version 1.1.9 with a video this evening.

This text above is mine and only translated in Englisch

Here's an overview of what changed in V1.1.9:

NarrowbandNet — Narrowband Colors from Your RGB Image

This is the change I'm most proud of. I trained my own neural network (U-Net architecture, 1.9 million parameters) that extracts the individual narrowband channels Ha, OIII, and SII from a completely normal broadband RGB image. That means: you don't need a dual-band filter or any narrowband equipment — AstroForge calculates from your image which areas emit hydrogen-alpha, where oxygen glows, and where sulfur is present. The Hubble palette, SHO, HOO, and all other narrowband palettes no longer work with rough color estimates, but with ML-extracted channels. The result: nebula structures get the color depth and channel separation that you'd otherwise only achieve with real narrowband filters or significantly more expensive software.

One important note here: Nothing is generated or added in any way that could alter the image! All of this is your data, just intelligently processed.

Image Quality

- The entire wavelet pipeline (sharpening, structure, LCE, HDR) now uses median-based decomposition instead of Gaussian — this eliminates ringing artifacts and delivers cleaner details

- HDR now has an overdrive mode with adaptive layers for more depth in nebulae

- Deconvolution now automatically measures the star width (FWHM) from your images instead of using a fixed value — significantly sharper results

- The background protection mask has been improved — detail sliders now enhance only nebulae, not background noise

New Features

- Curves Tool — replaces the old color shift. Tone curves for L/R/G/B with Catmull-Rom interpolation, applied directly to the nebula layer

- Purple Fringe Removal — removes purple halos around stars

- Auto Natural Palette for Star Separation — AstroForge now automatically applies the Natural palette before star separation, delivering significantly better results

Performance

- The entire render pipeline now runs in a separate thread — no more mouse freezes when moving sliders

- Faster slider response through optimized debouncing and cancellation of running calculations

Other

- Spanish translation complete

- Spikes are now evenly distributed across the image instead of clustering at the top

- Numerous bug fixes (TIFF export, undo after star separation, reset on image change, +/- buttons)

Version 1.1.9 is ready for download at Astroforge.de

Have a nice evening or whatever Daytime its on your side !

Last Video for today ...

This is the new 1.1.5 Version ! Much more powerful ... Nothing more to say ! Its cleaner , faster , and more powerful ...Please check the Video !

Eigentlich wollte ich heute nur Bilder bearbeiten...

Hatte mir den Abend freigehalten um endlich mal selbst ein paar Aufnahmen durch AstroForge zu jagen. Beim Vergleich von Preview und Export ist mir dann aufgefallen, dass die Ausgabe leicht vom Bildschirm abweicht — vor allem bei Schärfe und Struktur.

Mehrere Stunden Debugging später: Die Preview lief intern bei 1400px, der Export bei nativer Auflösung (1920px beim Seestar). Die Effekte mit festen Kernel-Größen sahen dadurch im Export etwas schwächer aus.

Zusätzlich fehlte der Glow-Effekt komplett im Export.

Beides ist jetzt gefixt. Preview und Export rendern für Seestar-Bilder jetzt in identischer Auflösung — pixelgenaues WYSIWYG.

Die neue Version ist bereits oben, trägt aber noch die Versionsnummer 1.1.3. Einfach nochmal runterladen und drüberinstallieren.

Ich bin trotzdem sehr zufrieden .. das Programm läuft ! Und ich denke es nährt sich langsam dem Ende . Sorry für die vielen Updates ! Leider kann ich kein updater bauen weil jedesmal an den Python Algos was geändert wird !

Danke für euer Feedback ... Durch euch habe ich es geschafft das Programm innerhalb der ersten Woche signifikant zu verbessern !

Also ... bitte updaten !!!