The first step is to get the brightness right across the image. Here the shadows are a bit too dark so needed brightening.

There are some things you always tweak when editing landscape photos. Sure, you’ve straightened the horizon and cropped that ...

One of the most significant advantages of using Affinity over GIMP is its non-destructive editing. In GIMP, every change you make is permanent unless you work with duplicate layers or revert manually.