Fix It Friday - Number 71

It's time for this week's Fix It Friday from I Heart Faces.  This week's pic had a mega blown sky so I created a fake sky in Photoshop to add back some detail to that area.  (I chose not to change the area of sky visible under the car because I thought it blended well with the edit as it was.)

Original

My edit

And a B&W one

My editing steps in PS CS5:


Color edit
Make rough selection of sky with lasso tool, create new layer
Select > Color Range, Fuzziness: 80, Sample sky
Set foreground color to light sky blue and background color to a darker sky blue
Gradient tool, Mode: Foreground to Background, Method: Radial
Draw a line from the bottom to the top of the sky
Transform sky layer (Command-T), drag bottom edge just below tree line
Blending mode of sky layer: Darken, Reduce opacity of sky layer 
Add layer mask and paint black over any areas the lasso tool accidentally selected that aren't sky
New adjustment layer > Levels
Adjust output levels of red channel to 250
New adjustment layer > Curves
Create S-shaped curve to boost contrast of midtones
New Layer
Sponge tool set to "saturate", Flow:50
Sponge over red part of truck
Reduce opacity of saturate layer to 20%
Flatten, resize, sharpen, save!


B&W edit
Create a gradient map (Black to White, Linear)
Levels Adjustment Layer - Reduce overall output to 250, Reduce output of blue channel to 245
Create two new gradient map layers (same as original one), Blending modes set to Sceen and Overlay
Reduce opacities of gradient map layers
Create new fill layer, fill with a light tan
Blending mode = Multiply, reduce opacity 
New curves adjustment layer to increase contrast of midtones, reduce opacity
Flatten, resize, sharpen, save!