Hi David,
Great first effort. Well done
I am a DSLR user, a Photoshop processor and in Bortle 8 Melbourne skies.
The best way I have found to deal with high dynamic range targets is as simple as patience. Yes you can do short subs and combinations but balancing them isn’t quite as easy as it sounds to remain natural looking. I know your new to this and keen to get lots of images and trust me we all love that but spending time on one target pays big dividends. If you lower your ISO you may think you’ll loose out on the feint stuff. This isn’t true. The photons are still hitting your sensor, they just are very feint and get lost in the noise. This is where patience comes in. Take double, triple, quadruple the number of subs. What you’ll find is that you increase the signal to noise ratio substantially. You’ll get to a point where you won’t need to stretch the image as much to bring out the feint nebulosity. Less stretching means less chance of blowing out the core. There is no doubt in my experience that the better the data to start with and the less you have to play with it, the better the end result. There are ways to deal with the highlights individually in Photoshop and to isolate certain areas to enhance but you have to be careful with them and again I repeat, the less of this you have to do the better. These techniques can be used for fine tuning and adding depth.
You’re off to a cracking start so keep going and well done so far.
Cheers
Ryan