"This is pretty typical of how science creates an image that isn't really there"
No the problem is you don't understand the pictures to begin with.
They don't add the colors for artistic reasons when doing the science or because they are fakes.
Sorry, but you have this all wrong. we have instruments that take pictures in xrays, Infrared and different wavelengths for a reason. One Infrared can penetrate gasses so we can see something we can't normally with visible light. We can also detect the electromagnetic spectrum. So light like the Cosmic back ground was visible light when it began, it has been stretched into the microwave band as the universe has expanded.
"These shape-shifting galaxies have taken on the form of a giant mask. The icy blue eyes are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the mask is their spiral arms. The false-colored image consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) and visible data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (blue/green).
NGC 2207 and IC 2163 met and began a sort of gravitational tango about 40 million years ago. The two galaxies are tugging at each other, stimulating new stars to form. Eventually, this cosmic ball will come to an end, when the galaxies meld into one. The dancing duo is located 140 million light-years away in the Canis Major constellation.
The infrared data from Spitzer highlight the galaxies' dusty regions, while the visible data from Hubble indicates starlight. In the Hubble-only image (not pictured here), the dusty regions appear as dark lanes."
The Hubble data correspond to light with wavelengths of .44 and .55 microns (blue and green, respectively). The Spitzer data represent light of 8 microns.
JPL | Space Images | Eyes in the Sky
"my body doesn't really look like the xray."
Your body really does look that way in Xray pictures. But you can't see in Xray, so they invented a way to use xray so they can take the picture and see (without using visible light) if you have a broken arm.