Hi Paul,

I use a DIY electroluminescent panel and needed to use 6 sheets of white paper to reduce the levels to allow for a exposure of 3 secs approx. Any filters that you use in taking your lights should be used in the flats. As an example I tend to use a ZWO duo narrowband filter as I am in an inner city location.

All my darks and flats and flat darks are taken with 120 gain, 30 offset and 50/50 balance which are my default values for all my light frames. I seem to recall major problems when I used darks with different offset values to the lights. This did cause a red cast that I could not process out so I keep everything standard now and have not had any issues since.
I tried to use APP a year back and could not get it to work satisfactorily and if I recall I did have issues with the flats. In the end I gave trying to get it to work as I already was using Pixinsight and had spent some time getting over the steep learning curve of this software. I just did not have the time to invest in APP.

I have never needed to examine the individual colour balance of flats as all the calibration is done before debayering and it never seemed important. The resulting images after calibration and integration of light frames always have a prominent red cast but this is easily fixed in histogram transformation. You can check this by doing an auto stretch using unlinked RGB channels.
Have you tried processing your lights without using flats and do they look OK?
Hopefully someone using APP and familiar with how it works can help.

I found the tutorial by "Bulrichi" that I have referenced in the guide a great help in understanding the camera and how calibration works. However I had to read it a few times to really understand it fully.

Cheers

Mike

Read More...