I did all this in 8 bit/channel mode, just for fun, I guess. The first thing I did was build a mask for the sky and saved it as a channel. Then I used Noise Ninja with this mask to clean up the sky.
For the mono conversion, I used two channel mixer adjustment layers, using opposing versions of the sky mask. For the CM settings, I like to start with the TLR actions, and then tweak them. I'd make my own, but Mitch has already done the work
. Since I didn't feather or blur the layer masks, there were some gaps at the seams letting some color in, so I merged all the visible layers into a new layer and slapped a Hue/Sat adjustment layer on it using a clipping mask. Here is PrtScn of it at that point:
click through to see full size PrtScn
The final touch was the high pass filter in two passes to sharpen it up a bit. There were a lot of jpeg artifacts that I should have cleaned up, but this is for the web, and you get the idea.
