” But it will prevent a lot of DSLR users, who did it in the wrong way, from processing old data right?”
No completely wrong I am afraid…
Calibrating old data is perfectly fine and possible in APP, why wouldn’t it be?
I am even calibrating old data from 2013 from Scott, @srosenfraz, which was sub-optimal calibrated with Images Plus. (Scott and I are working on a big project) So Scott and I decided to do it all over again which is working perfectly ? and we now have the benefit that Scott’s calibrated files are debayered with Adaptive Airy Disc instead of VNG which is much better for his DSLR RGB data. Scott has confirmed this to me as well.
“The flat calibration is done, but visually it seems it isn’t.”
That is because the master flat was created out of flats which were not bias calibrated. Then you will always see that the flat correction isn’t working as it should.
” So in the end these people just have to use PI or something to use the old flats then, which is fine by me, but I can imagine it can create some disappointment for others. ”
No, you are making invalid assumptioms here again I am afraid. Why would a program be able to calibrate rectenly created files perfectly but not files of an older age. That doesn’t make sense at all I think.
Like I said, APP can perfectly calibrated all known calibration paths, also on data that is ancient, as long as the right calibration files are supplied.
” So maybe doing it the PI way with HUGE warnings and telling people they should change their workflow in the future might be a good thing for a first version? I however totally get you don’t want to get into a slippery slope. ”
No, since this is simply not necessary.
It is quite clear that the principles of data calibration are hard to grasp and I will defintitely try to explain this thoroughly in APP’s manual and in warnings during the creation of the master frames.
Data calibration is a very important step in your data processing and I will not implement solutions that will give the user suboptimal results for the sake of simpler user experience. To me, that would be really dissapointing in such a scientific application…