I'm not sure that this image really does that much for me. I find that there is far too much water in the foreground that does not contribute to the image. Remove around 3/4 of the bottom, and the image starts looking more interesting.
Would getting rid of the rippled water in the middle help?
I like it and it would be a much stronger image if cropped up to where the water starts to gleam.
I agree with Manfred about the cropping out of much of the foreground water. I would also try and enhance the contrast in the clouds to make them look a little more "threatening" and try and brighten the colours on the sail of the yacht so that it stands out more. But that is just my personal taste.
The foreground of this image will be considered to be lacking information for the people who will say the same thing about a different image displaying an equally large plain sky. In other words, some people are gonna love what the foreground does for the image and some people are gonna say to trash it. Go with what you like.
It's a stunning image for me. The birds really make the image. So, I would crop it as already discussed, though not for the reasons discussed. I would crop it to help bring more attention to those lovely birds.
The technical details are important to you, so take a close look at the bushes at 100%. Some of them display what might be purple fringing, but it's difficult to tell at this small size.
Spent three hours this morning with the image...moving this/liquifing that/all around
messing with the image. Gonna come back to it later.
BTW...it was the first time trying to use a 300mm lens on a landscape and merging
a ton of images, to the point it wound up coughing out a 4x5 ft. image.
I see a moving sailboat, waves and ripples.Windless? But even more important i see a shot I like.
Unless you have a very specific reason to do so (i.e. you are planning to make an extremely large print), I think this is more of an academic exercise to prove to yourself that you can do this.
I've done panos at 200mm for very much the same reason (to see what this would do for me) and found that atmospheric effects (haze, dust and moisture in the air as well as thermal differentials) pretty well negated any advantage that the larger image has. A sea scape will always have these issues, unless the water has turned to ice. Taking this type of shot in the fall or winter, when these effects have less of an impact and in some cases are virtually none-existent, I might try this again.
Reason...just to see if I could and...the results of the endeavor.
One thing that I discovered is a lot of distortion tools are grayed-out with images over 35 ".
I like what you did, I would add a very little purple color cast to the green piece of land for a more realistic look![]()
I use 16 bit ProPhoto as well @ 300 ppi...there does seem to be some inconsistently at work here.
I just open a RAW image into PS 2015>increased image size to 39" @ 300 ppi (783 MB image size)
and they were grayed out. Started over and increased image size to 38.5...they worked fine???
I don't know enough about what goes on under the hood to explain the inconsistency.
I kind of like it as it is. The vast water gives a sense of being small in the big blue...purple planet.