Very impressive image Leo! I found this quite a difficult target to process. You've done well. I enjoyed the rich colours you've portrayed as they provide good contrast between the emission and reflection nebs in the scene.
I think what distracted me those most however were the bloated stars across the scene. Either you've got some bad subs in the masters or the overall seeing conditions weren't supportive of the focal length. I see you're still running Photoshop CS2. Perhaps its time for an upgrade? CS4 onwards has a great tool known as Liquify. You probably heard of it? When operating in pucker mode, its far better than the minimum filter (ghastly!) and the pinch tool (which sucks as it only operates in 8bit mode). Liquify is the bomb!
Hey, look on the bright side - if the tool can
make fat people thin, just imagine what it can do to those stars! There's plenty of info online. Experiment with the settings to get good results. I took a very rough run of Liquify to Vdb 157 as seen below. Need to spend more time to correctly match stellar profiles but just want to drive the point.
In most cases stars are what make an image so helps to look after them!
