The course materials suggested that I should select the sky and work with the selection on the same layer - however, I thought that using two separate layers may be easier, as I could hopefully then 'clean up' the selection after desaturating the sky if necessary. I therefore made a duplicate layer and selected the sky using the magic wand tool. I then deleted the sky from the top layer.
I removed almost all of the saturation from the background layer, but left a tiny amount of colour as I felt it looked more natural. I then used the Levels command to adjust the brightness. I made a separate, feathered selection around the lower group of clouds and pushed the levels further in that area, to make the cloud bases darker.
As instructed, I adjusted the saturation of the greens and yellows in the top area to simulate low, strong sun. The image didn't look quite right around the horizon, though, so I used a low opacity eraser to rub away some of the top layer on the distant hill. This had the effect of lowering the saturation in that area, which looked better to my eye. Here's the result:
My reactions are mixed - on the one hand, it does look like a dark, stormy sky at first glance. On the other hand, if you look closely, the clouds are the 'wispy' summer type, so are possibly not convicing as storm clouds. Also, there are some burnt out areas of cloud where no detail had been retained - it was therefore not possible to darken these using Levels without losing all of the white.
An interesting, and very straightforward, technique, though.
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