Noob question

DrummerBoy

So I have this photo and I'd like to do some adjustments to it and actually have it still look natural. Tried messing around but I'm very very new to all this.
So any help would be nice

Looking to bring out the detail in the sky on this one and possibly bring up the greens of the grass at the bottom left of the photo.

How would I go about that? I have PS 7 and DPP.

Photo

Fajitas!

One of my favourite tricks:

Create a Channel Mixer adjustment layer & select the monochrome option, click ok.

Change the blend mode to soft light.

Open up the Channel Mixer panel again, and bring down the blue's.

click on your gradient tool with the colours black & white in use, and draw a gradient going down through it. Or if you have time, click the paintbrush and use black to get the area bright ie: the grass and white where you want the blue's standing out.

Edit:

Result -

latchiko

If you want to keep it natural I would suggest using an Adjustment Layers. This will allow you to apply adjustments to the image and will also allow you to modify them to taste afterwards. This is a non-destructive method whereby you are not actually changing the original image until you save it as a jpeg.

So, to bring out some detail in the sky, you could try adding some contrast. The easiest option is to use a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. I'm not familiar with PS7 but it's probably in the Layers menu (possibly Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Brightness/Contrast). Just increase the contrast a little until you are happy with the sky. Once this is done you can paint over the rest of the image (i.e. everything except the sky) using black paint in the mask to the right of your adjustment layer.

To bring up the greens on the bottom of the photo, you could use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Increase the saturation of green (and most likely Yellow) in the dialog box and you can once again mask anything you don't want saturated.

If any of this doesn't make sense I can post a few screenshots to help out.