Slit scan style landscape photo
I'm not sure if slit scan is the right term for what I'm trying to do but I think it might be slit scan adjacent...
I'm creating a piece of art by taking a landscape photo of a lake and trees, turning each vertical line of pixels into a layer and then aligning the horizon so that it becomes a perfectly flat line effectively leveling all the trees with each other. I've found a script to turn all the lines into layers and i'm using a guide to align the tops of the trees manually (which, with a 4800 pixel wide image is pretty time consuming!). Is there any trick that can make the aligning faster? I asked gemini and it suggested using displacement maps but it doesn't seem to be working the way I hoped it would (I could just be doing it wrong). To be clear, I know it will be incredibly distorted and I'm looking for that. I also want the individual lines of pixels to poke up and down into a blank white canvas.
Any tips?