Thanks for all the comments
When the oranges covered the whole sky the right side was significantly darker, I did apply curves to bring the brightness up and keeping the layer in "normal" mode preserved the colors as I remember them.
For the second version I did reduce the tif files to 50% of the original size as the performance of Ps on the machine I had gets awful with large panos, I'm back at home and will try again at 100%.
and yes I'm planning to print it