Hello Mark,   Alnitak is arguably one of the most difficult stars to tame in an image. The way I approach any bright star is to treat the glare as a point source. You can do this by making quite a large circular mask with a heavy feather . This will allow you to reduce its intensity radially which I tend to do it in smaller increments rather than one large step. Hope this helps you Regards Peter

Also another point is generally its the shorter wavelengths that are more effected by glare as the signal tends to scatter more. It effects  the blue and greens so on  images and when you do a brightness change it can cause colour casts in the underlying emission, so you may need to also adjust the colour balance.

Peter Thanks - I shall give this a go.  Will look up to see how to do that in PI, but may be this part is easier to do in photoshop... Regards Mark