Nice Mike
NGC2438 is one of my favourites.
Dark results from automated processing in Images Plus is pretty standard for me as well. And understandable if you consider that the 16 bit fits or tiff files are stretched to their full 0 - 65535 tonal scale. If you save them as tiffs and then open them into PS you then raise your black point with levels to just to the left of the histogram and then use curves to stretch the dark to mid range. If you do this a couple of times (using levels in between to raise the black point to keep it just to the left of the histogram) you will see the detail come out.