This is one of those things that I always kinda wondered about and thought was probably the case when we all started seeing those colorful deepspace photos of nebulae, but I never looked into it.
Recently, I discovered quora.com, where people go to ask and answer all kinds of questions about all kinds of things.
And there it was... somebody had asked... and it was answered by someone who worked at NASA. Kinda ticks me off. I wonder how many people believe in this fabricated bedazzlement? Our gubmint selling us lies for money. Harrumph.
Does NASA use Photoshop?
Kaz Vorpal, Former NASA contractor
I worked at NASA, in charge of the rework of the Hubble Space Telescope's website. At that time, they heavily used Photoshop, and other graphics tools, to manipulate the kind of space images you're talking about.
This did not just involve cleaning up an image, or stitching some together, or adding marks to show where something was. It also included altering the fundamental way images looked, to make them prettier, more desirable, and so on.
In fact, many of the most beautiful graphics that NASA uses as its hallmarks, to drum up support, are in this sense largely fake. The famous Eagle Nebula pic (I'll attach a version of it), for example, was originally greyscale, the colorization is completely human-added.
So its award-winning beauty, the staple go-to promotional tool of the Office of Public Outreach, is just a PR gimmick.
This is consistent with what I learned about NASA, in general. The sole focus of every part of the organization I encountered was to profit through increased funding, using whatever means was necessary, including PR gimmicks. They spent a small fortune on a tool to "measure the ozone layer" that added no useful information at all. When I asked why, I was told that having an astronaut pointing an instrument through a shuttle window at the earth, useless though it may be, was a great photo op, to boost funding. The concept of Fear Equals Funding was rife there, as well as an obsession with making sure nothing was done too fast or efficiently, to ensure that budgets were always used up, preferably that projects fell short, even if they could have been done with money to spare.
This image's beauty is through colors added by humans, through Photoshop or some other tool. The real thing would look nothing like this.
Somebody please Photoshop that and change it to very dark blue & white. It will be just as beautiful, IMO.