What I currently do is stack the image. take the stacked unprocessed image and do a slight curves adjustment in
Then fix white balance usually with levels tool which does a fairly good job
Take the image and put it into fitswork4 and flatten the background gradient with variable flatten tool
Do some further curves edits to bring out fainter details and push the background sky down so its way darker and brings out a lot more of the faint details.
then I'll sometimes do color denoise and only in severe noise cases use NLM noise reduction just enough to reduce the noise so its not as offensive.
occasionally do things a little differently but this is the general idea.
Sometimes I will take the image back and forth between fitswork4 and