Telescope time is precious and while it’s hard to throw away data, better to get things like focus, tracking, collimation and camera tilt sorted…
as these are things you can control…as opposed to the weather and seeing…hence I'd suggest fixing each of them before starting any new imaging sessions.
I take the GIGO approach to my data: Garbage In Garbage Out. No amount of processing can fix vanilla data…
so unless I’ve captured ET phoning home…I toss it out.
M42 has a massive dynamic range, and is hard to do well.
Do some research..have a look at a few benchmark M42’s on the web, for a colour reference look at Malin’s AAO image. (the blue is subtle)
Accurate colour can be difficult to assess, but if you read in the image
data it's M42 with SII OIII Ha NII plus an alphabetical soup of more exotic filters,
then the colour is likely not accurate/natural. (assuming that is what you want to depict)
Exacting astrophotography while not easy, can be very rewarding when it all comes together so stick with it.
