Interpret this as though it were your own.

[ggroess]

I like it...How much did you tone it down??

The JPG artifact is a problem but the RAW file has none...

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Just a tad or two ! - here she is with all layers at 100%
The base layer is lighten colour corrected CM and then a Jacob's Ladder with L as the control - allowed me to do silly things with the colours without having to mask
Then I used CM to change different parts of the image, with a couple of blend layers of Dissolve & Linear Dodge before finally blurring the whole lot in Screen blend.

I did have an overall objective before I started (!) and that was
atmosphere/mist in the top of the image,
colour in the bottom
and a strange glow at the base of the trees
- I needed to lighten the image significantly to be able to play and then tone down again

Great fun, but definitely not what we should be doing to photographs or this course

[mikemeister_admin]

Let me throw a thought out for you all - this is an atmospheric image and of our 3 renditions it is interesting to see how the tones change the mood and perspective.
Here are the 4 images (with the original just processed by auto-levels) with all the detail removed and just 5 equal (tone) stops showing.  I'm beginning to find this an interesting way to look at a photo to see how the composition hangs together. 
Probably a daft idea, but just to give you something to think about!

[ggroess]

I will have more to say about this later..I need time to digest it a bit...
Interesting way to look for composition..is this one of the end results of your journey over the winter??

[mikemeister_admin]

I give up for now.  I know what I want to try first but I wasn't getting anywhere.
After cropping some off right side and erasing some of the remaining trees...
I wanted to select the trees and lighten them as per some of the attempts above. Right now I'm too tired to use the selection tools effectively. I might then have lightened the fog slightly but being sure to keep it grey - in one of the images it was getting bluish.

[ggroess]

Later in the course we will cover masks and layers.  You might be able to use the L channel to make a mask to accomplish the same things you are trying to select...

Mark...this is the deep end of the pool the courser starts out with the basics and we build from there...

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Bu what is an L channel?

[mikemeister_admin]

You will learn about the Lab colour space, which uses 3 channels, like the RGB colour space, but they hold different information
Here is an image showing the channels
- top row is Original, a & then b channels (in their own colours)
and the bottom row are the 3 channels L, a & b in grey as you will see them in photoshop.
Go search for Lab colour space on the web and have a wee read before the course starts - have fun
Chris