I actually liked the initial one better.
I feel there's a little too little and too bright stars there. The many and little stars are missing. It's a very subtle transition between obvious noise and credible starfield IMO where the things look good. I'd say somewhere in between these two would be my standard of good-looking pic.
Practically there's always a certain amount of stars in the background at least inside any given galaxy. On that pic there's areas completely wiped out of stars. I'd personally try adding stars on some areas than removing (erasing) them.
Other thing that meets my eye is that the nebulae are nowhere near aligned to stars *, and the hc physicist inside me raises his ugly head and says "that's plain wrong because the stars are BORN inside the nebulae..."
I'd personally take the following approach:
-Create a "background starfield" by carefully adjusting the noise with brightness/contrast
-add some local nebulae onto new layer (for example, play around with GIMP's "Plasma", Color it whatever you like and set black as alpha channel.
-then mark some denser spots of nebulae and plant bigger, "local" stars and star consentrations onto those areas. Blur these stars to make a glow around them. Then colour this layer about the same as the nebulae. That way you'll get the most stars on the places where there is most gas, which would be likely in space - and it appears that these stars lighten the nebula itself.
-add some local objects like a sun for local light source, odd planet here or there, 80 saths around mentioned star and so on.
I made an about 20-min meddling according these ones and came up with quite a nice pic actually (according to my standars of a credible-looking space, of course)
Here's what it looks:
If you want bigger file but not remarkably higher quality, here are some:
High-res *.jpg of 820 KB (1280x1024)
High-res *.png 2,1 MB (1280x1024)
There's not really very much difference in quality on these two. But I also managed to complete this atrocity of a space picture. Sadly it, too, lacks any planetary bodies in sight - it's just stars and nebulae.
5000x5000 7,6 MB *.jpg (a different part of space, though)
It became quite... zoomable.
*EDIT: Well, the nebulae are actually aligned to some extent but not in the right way IMO
. But I'm just being hypercritical I think - don't get mad at me
