Thanks for the feedback folks.
Greg; one of the problems I was having with this was not darkening the lower dust clouds too much using levels. I readjusted the dark point, but it seemed to flatten the antares dust cloud too much. I retried using the shadow/highlights, at 5% shadow it looked ok, a bit flat, but I left the highlights as any adjustment made it look worse.
Part of the issue is most likely the difference in calibration of my laptop monitor. Yes I process on a laptop and not on a decent monitor. My bad.
The order of images is New Levels, Shadow/highlights and original. The Histos show the original on the left and the new stretch on the right for the preceding photo.
Thanks for the input. I'll keep practicing.