Thanks Rod!
Yeah I watched Harry's tuts, they were a good start.
I'll check out LHE, thanks for the tip.
I didn't have much luck with HDRMT, actually it was weird, I did a Lum mask and a small preview and chucked on a default HDRMT and it looked really good, so I closed the preview and chucked the same HDRMT onto my main image and it was totally different with much less effect. I played with the HDRMT tool for another half hour and was never able to replicate what I had seen that first time. I'm sure I changed something but I'm buggered if I know what!
More trial-and-error needed
EDIT: just had a super quick play with LHE and I like it! I'll definitely be exploring that a bit further when I have time!
Here's the result of a bit of LHE and some curves to bring down the star bloat a bit (perhaps too much?)