Good on you ...
I will share with you a little thing which is considered cheating by some...but try the dodge and burn tools in photo shop or in gimp..go very delicately by setting the exposure way down but with these tools you can selectively brighten or darken selected areas defined by a circle that you can resize big or small. Be careful as they are very powerful tools and as it is wuth things of power go gently...with practice you will find these tools very handy for tweeking an image.
If you don't have Photoshop and given how xy it is these days understandable then download GIMP...it's free and the people behind it seem to be on a mission to be better than Photoshop...but you will find it handy for many things...and there are some excellent tutorials on YouTube even how to process astro photos.
Now the other thing when you are bored..do various tweaks in photo shop or Gimp and then layer them and using the rubber tool bring the best of one image into the other..do many versions and repeat
until all objectively has left your thinking
Alex