First time anyone ever wanted to know what I did. I hope I do not confuse you.

I applied what I learned from trying to do the Dragan pictures. The main parts are as follows.

1.Background copy
2.Add layer mask and white out (erase) upper two thirds of the picture but keep the tree of course. I also white out (erase) the background between the limbs until I came to the fine details part in the upper third of the tree.
3.I then copied that layer three times. I set two copies to linear burn blend mode and one copy to screen blend mode. Screen copy on top.
4.I added mask layer to those three copies and blended in the amount of darkness and lightness I wanted with a paint brush set to about 25% opacity.
5.I made another background copy and used levels adjustment layer to darken the background. added mask to this and and adjusted the grass to lighter shade so it fit the tree.
6. made another background copy and set Median (6) and Gaussian blur (3) to blur background. Added mask. Made copy of this. On one copy I did a gradient blur from top left to bottom right. On the other copy I did a gradient blur from top right to bottom left.