Something bothers me on this photo, but I have no clue what. All in all I think it is a good shot, but I can’t get rid of the feeling that I could have done better. Maybe you can show me what’s the reason for this feeling. Is it composition, colour, brightess or anything else.
Show me your versions and have fun!
20240922-1111-7225.CR3 (34,3 MB)
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20240922-1111-7225.CR3.xmp (14.2 KB)
I didn’t notice anything that bothers me - certainly nothing “hurts my eyes”. Did a fairly straightforward edit and actually like the photo quite a bit.
There seems to be a bit of a “twist” in the perspective. I rotated it to make the tower appear closer to vertical, but I still feel like the lower building to the left is leaning down from left to right. I am almost useless with the perspective controls, and everything I tried was awful.
20240922-1111-7225.CR3.xmp (14.9 KB)
I think you may be on to something. The twisting or “leaning of the lower building” seems to be amplified by it’s reflection in the water. Nothing much anyone can do about it - it’s just the way things turned out in this photo.
20240922-1111-7225.CR3.xmp (15.5 KB)
I find it an attractive image.
All I have done in GIMP is to slightly reduce the overall contrast whilst increasing the mid-range contrast.
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for 
Nothing to complain, quite the contrary!
Going off some of the “twist” discussion earlier, played around with a crop focused just on the tower. Can attest, no matter which I way I rotated the crop, that tower never straightened up in a way that made sense! Ended up mostly back to the neutral rotation point.
The reflections fill nicely in in what could otherwise have been a fairly empty area of the image.
But reading the image from left to right, as we normally do, we end up on a line/structure that carry us out to and beyond the right hand edge of the image. So if using the image for illustrative purposes, I would flip the image to lead focus to the main interest of the image, the buildings. For documentary use of the image that is of course no option.
If there is something else that creates a certain amount of “disturbance” in an otherwise tranquil scene, it could be the trees that are cut off. The one at the right hand side of the image is probably too high that you could have put it wholly within the frame at capture without creating unwanted cropping of the mirroring in the water. But that tree on the left, as the image is now, I would just crop a little to try to make it more “harmonious within the frame” as some of the others also have done.
(Otherwise I cannot improve on your excellent image processing skills.)
So, allowing myself a flip:
I thought giving it a pastel look might improve things a bit. I did consider adding saturation to the green, but, late morning sun in autumn suggested keeping it less contrasty. I would also liked to saturate the blue sky, but there are too much of white clouds to get any significant change. Here is my version. Hope you like it
