How do I reduce the luminance of this sky without it looking weird?

This is a picture I took yesterday:

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The sky is a bit too washed out for me so I’d like to crank down the luminance of the blue. Camera Raw makes a valiant effort but the crane trusses and other incidentally blue things end up looking…off:

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I opened it as a smart object in PS CS6 to try and mask out the sky but the magic wand tool feels like a club instead of a scalpel when it comes to masking out the bits of sky poking through the crane. Also, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do from there because all the typical level controls are disabled.

How would I go about getting the desired sky in photoshop without the weird fuzziness/coloring on the cranes and buildings?

Answer

Use the menu Select-> Color range. Then choose the +eyedropper icon and drag across the gradient of the sky until you have the sky selected. Then go to the Adjustments (under the layers panel) and choose Hue/Saturation, Curves or whatever you want to do with the sky.

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Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : BB ON , Answer Author : Komental

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