>>2882924Crop looks so much better and well thought out. I'll agree with
>>2882927about the color of the sky and sand texture differentiating the images enough.
The lone background dune bleeding out of the edge of the frame seemed like a sloppy oversight. Just to experiment I added another dune on the left image doing something similar and I think even that works better than the original image you posted. Feels a bit more balanced and the continuation carries throughout the overall composition.
Also just gave your luminosity tutorial a try. My fuck what have I been doing with my images for the past 10 years... This method is absolutely killer!