Mike,
These are excellent shots. I think I like the one with red as luminance better, but both are very nice.
One comment on PixInsight wavelet processing. For Nebula, the HDRWavelet transform does flatten contrast overall -- that is the intent of the algorithm. But with that flattening you can then use curves to adjust contrast where you want it. It keeps the bright areas from getting saturated while brightening the darker areas. In your shots, the bright areas are not over-saturated so HDRWavelet isn't much of a help.
The ATrous Wavelet transform will bring our more nebular details, but would take some careful masking not to harm the beautiful star background you have. Perhaps a sharpened image could be blended with the original as a new layer in Photoshop with an overlay or softlight blending and a layer mask to selectively pass the sharpening.
Altogether, great work.
--Andy
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