Boston Skyline Painting

I am about to embark on painting a 50-inch by 50-inch wrapped canvas in oils of the Boston Skyline for my son's new apartment in the Back Bay. There is a large blank wall he wants to fill to brighten up the living room above the fireplace. He found some photos online, emailed them to me, and I worked in Adobe Photoshop to combine and revise, until I reached a version that he and his girlfriend, who shares the apartment, agreed on.  
We had back and forth conversations via email, such as below where I wrote in response to his expression of joy at the design and curiosity about how I was able to do the mock-up: 

I really like the modern effect - it will be a challenge for me to use a different technique. I can make the clouds more wispy, sure.

I used Photoshop Elements - I have it on the old computer in Jean's room. I basically resized all the photos to scale correctly, cloned parts of the three together, then put the whole new composite on a new transparent background layer, cropped it and filled in the top and bottom, cloning sky and water and adding clouds. Then I isolated the foreground and upped the saturation and added a texture, isolated the middle-ground and did the same - different texture, and finally did the same to the background. I used gradually less texture foreground to background to create depth.

I will go back to the "drawing board" and take your ideas into consideration.

The latest is to put a sailboat in the foreground. I will gladly do this and perhaps put a couple in the boat. Perhaps it will be a Tech Dinghy. My husband and I used to sail Tech Dinghies on the Charles when we were younger and just starting out as a couple. Above are images I found on Google Images.