Johnny Ringo said:

Regarding Kirk's arrival, Not sure if you've looked at this already but i would strongly suggest trimming down this seqence...It seems a little jarring, the focus is on things that are irrelevant and the shuttles seem to appear out of nowhere...

I would suggest losing 1,3,4.

Yes, its like there are FIVE establishing shots for "Kirk beams to a space station." "Darn it, we have all these shots of the model, use them all!"

Just tinkering away after work...

THAT looks great! I tried doing the sun shot just using Hue/Saturation, and it looked decent enough.

Here's an opening concept.

I like the original titles. These are too close to the TNG movies, while the existing ones match the style for the TOS movies. Only better because they're not just words I'll fast forward to on my way to the movie.

And here's my idea re: the mattes. As you can see the results are less than stunning.

For some shots it's a lot easier to hide simply by adjusting the contrast, which I see they did on the Bluray realease...

I really don't think they should be done by hand, but it certainly looks that they'll have to be. Except for the deep space shots, which can be fixed by contrast as you sample here.