Technique
The exposure and focus are both soft in ways that suggest either a phone camera in tricky light or a missed focus point, and the water itself has almost no detail left after whatever saturation and clarity adjustments were applied. I shoot architecture, not rivers, but the same principle holds: when you push processing hard enough to lose texture in your primary subject, you've gone past enhancement into destruction. The sky is blown completely white with no gradient, which might have been the condition on site but is reading as a technical limitation rather than a choice. If this was shot on a phone, you're already at the edge of what the sensor can hold in a high-contrast forest scene. The framing concept is sound, the vertical orientation fits the subject, but the file itself doesn't have the information to support the level of color intensity you've asked it to carry.
Marketability
The saturation is running this image into a corner that most buyers won't follow it into. What you've called "dark waters" reads electric lime and cyan, a palette that signals fantasy or heavy digital manipulation rather than mystery or the threshold between stillness and shadow your statement promises. Landscape buyers who want atmospheric work expect restraint, and right now the greens are shouting over the mood. The composition itself has commercial potential — vertical frame, river as lead line, natural tunnel of foliage — but the processing has pushed it past what home decor and editorial markets will touch. If you want this to sell, you're looking at a niche audience that specifically seeks hyper-saturated nature abstracts, which exists but is small.
Pricing
Don't price this yet. The gap between what the image is doing and what you're describing it as doing means you haven't resolved what you're actually selling. A print market wants the atmospheric mystery you wrote about, which would command modest landscape rates once the processing matched the vision. A digital art market might embrace the saturated interpretation, but you'd be competing in a space where technical finish matters and this still reads as a phone capture with sliders cranked. Get the piece to match your intention first, then price for the market that intention serves. Starting price conversations on unresolved work costs you twice, once in the wrong buyer and once in training yourself to defend choices that aren't working.
What's working
The composition is doing exactly what it should. You've positioned the stream as a central spine that pulls the eye from foreground rocks straight back into that tunnel of trees, and the symmetry of the foliage banks on either side gives the frame structure without making it stiff. That geometry is carrying the image even through the processing issues. The concept in your statement is also strong, that threshold between stillness and mystery, and there is a version of this scene that delivers on that promise. You're looking at the right moments, the kind of light and atmosphere that holds something unresolved, and that instinct is worth more than any technical fix.
What to push
The biggest opportunity here is learning to recognize when saturation is serving the feeling you want and when it's working against it. Mystery lives in subtlety, in the almost-visible, in tones that make you lean in rather than flinch back. Right now the color is so aggressive it's flattening the depth and mood you're describing. Try pulling the saturation back by half and see if the scene starts to breathe again. Look specifically at the greens and cyans, which are the most overpowered, and ask whether dialing them down lets the shadows do more of the atmospheric work. The statement you wrote suggests you're drawn to what's hidden and half-seen, but the processing is revealing everything at full volume. Let the image have some reserve.
One next step
Open this file and reduce global saturation by 40 to 50 percent, then look at it again tomorrow. Don't add anything else, don't try to rescue it with other adjustments, just pull that one slider and sit with what remains. If the mood you described starts to appear when the color backs off, you'll know the instinct in your statement was right and the processing was the mismatch. If it still doesn't land, the problem might be earlier in the capture, but you can't see that clearly until the saturation stops shouting.
Amazing.!!!