All my pictures I consider as living documents, after the first editing I gets one result which can be pleasing to my eye, the next day I finds it not and does some
changes here and there. Sometimes the first result can be awful when working with the picture so a different approach may be needed. It is more or less a black picture from the beginning and it is easy to get carried away when the image starts to emerge. Some of the pictures here has actually been in the editing bench many times over time.

How I approach the editing itself various from picture to picture, I do most of the work in Pixinsight, there is no exact "correct" way to edit a picture as it changes from picture to picture. What matters to me is to try to get an image that suits my own taste.

The final result can appeal to you but not to others as there are many different ways and opinions on how a picture should look. To bright, to dark, to much color, to little color, to much noise, removed to much noise and so on. My pictures looks very different today compared to when I started this about 1.5 light year ago so I guess I have done some developing.

This is how the RAW picture looks after it has been stacked , in this case it is done with 30 pics and in Deep Sky Stacker.

After stretching it looks like this, a border needs to be removed and the vignetting caused by the optics (darkening of the corners), there are some excellent tools to fix this.

Now the cropping and the background has been fixed and we got a more appealing picture.
Increasing colors

This area has a little bit to much stars in my opinion, there are nice tools for that as well. After using that and done some noise reduction on the background I got this.

Finally after adjusting the contrasts and smaller details my final image is done