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Hi Swannies,
I'm new to doing astrophotography and using DSS, but I may be able to help from what I discovered so far. When the image has finished stacking and alligning in DSS I simply save it as a 16 bit Tiff and exit. Don't worry that it is grey in appearence. I then open it up in photoshop elements 8. I don't have full PS yet. It initially comes up as a dark image. I use the levels control to gradually bring up the exposure. I move the middle slider a bit to the left of the exposure histogram (Don't try to do it all in one go). Close the levels tool, and then open it up and move the middle slider a bit more. After doing this close and open routine a few times the exposure histogram should have moved off the left hand side and be somewhere between the left and middle. The image should look fairly bright. You can then move the left hand slider in towards the right to darken the background of the image. Be careful not to move it to far into where the histogram is or you will start to lose data in the object. Only when I am happy with how the image looks with the levels, do I then increase the saturation to bring out more colour otherwise I have found it will saturate any background colour. I also do the saturation in a couple of steps. For example take it to say 20%, ok it, open it again and do say 10% more.
I hope how I do it gives you some help.
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