some photomanipulation with Aseprite.. Ended up needing quite a lot of fiddling and palette stuff for getting the conversion working, and then to manually edit and clean up the stuff to have it be a bit clearer.
Aseprite's Jumble-tool is such a fun thing for smoothing and dithering manually, works for both the sky and water (straight off the conversion they were somewhat weirder)
Getting the 56 mirroring from the water was also kind of a weird thing with transparency and layers and whatnot.. I would've liked an anisotropic jumble/blur to get that extreme horizontal stretching without much vertical one.