Photoshop PP C&C Requested!

Hi. Until now, I had only a PowerShot A540 to work with and as we know, it doesn't even come close to high quality color saturation a good photo should exhibit. Please comment on my PP work; this was the very first time I tried it and my skills haven't improved much since then. It is very basic; color levels were selectively adjusted in Photoshop 7.0 for the car, grass, road, and sky; overall contrast was lightly touched as well to better depict how the scene appeared to the naked eye.

BEFORE

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I like the touch up: much brighter and attractive. But what did you do to the blue in the sky? It seems as if there are now clouds/a swarm of birds or something spotty between the clouds that were already there...???

I know what you're talking about. That is a result of me using the magic wand to select the sky to save time.

Personally, I like the first better. It's much more realistic to me.

Yeah, you may want to mask off the sky and put it on another layer, to alter it separately.

Thanks. The issue there was that the original looked nothing like the actual image I was trying to capture. Everything from the depth in the car's paint, the brightness of the sunlight etc. was too flat and muddled by the poor image sensor of the A540. The PP result is slightly over saturated in the color of the sky but the rest, to me, was faithful to the actual image. Oh and I did add more green to the grass as well; it was Fall after all, and here in Colorado, it comes way too early!