You can also use the curves adjustment to individually stretch the RGB bands - it was described in S&T about a year back. Bend the red up in the middle, drop the green slightly in the middle and shut the blue off entirely. You can also boost the lower end of the red to make the prominences slightly redder than the rest of the sun. While I don't claim this will produce anything as good as Peter Ward's mosaics, I quite like the result. I wonder if having a few extra bits of data helps, as well as excellent optics? I notice Mr Ward uses a 12 bit camera.
Also, I don't generally take a second run of prominence exposures, but I suspect many of the good imagers do.
http://astrobin.com/11437/
cheers,
Andrew.