palm trees, change sky background problems

[canar]

I have a picture with a number of individual Hawaiian palm trees and hanging leaves in front of a washed out sky. I wish to put a better somewhat cloudy but nice blue sky instead. The problem is that all the "change the background" tutorials seem to deal with a sky without many items in the way of the sky. The many leaves of the palm trees hang down and many are a very light colour and not "green" against the current sky. I have tried the erase background tool and smart select brush but trying to select each pixel is an unproductive solution and extremely time consuming. The many small "holes" of light between the palm leaves let alone around each tree trunk makes the task huge. Also the smart selection brush will only go to 2 pixels selection even if I wanted to click thousands of times to refine the area to be replaced. Surely there is an easier way to delete the washed sky and leaving the faint palm leaves that are not the exactly sky colour intacted to achieve a nice blue sky without an outline around each leaf, trunk or other edges. What am I doing incorrectly? I have attached a small size of the picture so you can see what I mean. Thanks for any suggestions. I'm using PSP X7. Windows 8.1.

[hartpaul]

That reminded me of a tutorial on isolating planes and jet trails . The jet trails would be similar at their edges to what you are wanting to do with the leaves.
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/paints ... p_1jet.htm

[rondo]

In these situations I usually try just to change the color, in this case the sky, using the Color Changer or Change to Target (preserves detail), or Color Replacer.