Feedback & Guidance: M42 Blown out core

Just to add a different perspective.  And not to invite any flak from what I am about to say, such HDR methods can be very powerful, and like all the other tools at hand with any given software such as color saturation, hue, denoise, stretching, blackpoint clipping, whatever..., it can be overused or abused.

With the "terrestrial" applications of HDR, which are generally limited by the automatic software settings, it is easier to understand visually because of reduced degree of the algorithms is usually adjusted to fall within a perception of reality and experience within a human's expectations.  In other words, many people have actually seen snowcapped mountains and deep blues skies above, but our photos rarely show that.  Well the HDR setting on a newer camera gets that..., and the image makes sense to a human brain.  In astrophotos, if overapplied, to me it makes some of these HDR processed images look crushed in dynamic range.  Understand that even our 16 bit, >100,000 e well depths cannot necessarily capture the full range that M42 presents.  And there is a reason for that.  Although, please see my recent attempt with my new camera at zero gain

Orion Nebula - First Light with new QHY268c, Celestron Motor Focus, N.I.N.A., multistar guiding with PHD2

as I was trying to figure out the best settings and exposures.  In those conditions I still blew out some of the brighter stars (see the widefield "revision" ), yet was able to see a lot of detail in the trapezium "nursery" area.  Yet I would struggle to get good presentation of the wonderful dark nebulosity that should be in the wider field that can be desirable for some (and me!).  (The flairs in some of the brighter stars in the widefield image is from diffraction from tree branches!)  In many bright nebulae, the source (or more importantly the direction) of illumination is clearly definable (M42, Iris, Cygnus Wall, etc.).  Our brains naturally understand that illumination falls off as a function of distance.  Its no different between a bright cluster buried in clouds and a lamp situated in a dark living room.  That gradient defines a lot about the structure of the object.  To remove that, by the over-application of HDR methods, thereby flattens the image.  But I do concede that it can be done very well.

So HDR is very much like some of those others things like color, etc.  Yes you can do just about anything, but in the end it is your judgement, since this is art.  I personally love the cloud structures and colors that naturally drop in illumination a they extend some distance from the trapezium.  Whether I can count and separate the stars of the trapezium, well, there are stars enough in the image...  But overuse of HDR often makes the clouds of M42 look more like a USGS contour map of some mountain range rather than a deep sky image.  If you have a deep 16 bit image and deep well sensor (lower your gain/iso as stated above), you can do an awful lot with gradually masked stretching to get you more deeply into that bright region.  And all with a single stacked image and a few rather simple steps.  But that will likely not get you the trapezium if that is a must.   Bottom line, this is art, so to each his own!