I'm not a great one for posting, but you could look here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenbatey/
(Hope this posts OK, it looks like I'm seeing double at the moment).
On the upper leaves, I'll run a quick test and report back. It should be a simple matter of selecting and either lightening or desaturating. I can't post my results back because I don't know how...
If you want to be brutal to one of my photos, there's one up on another forum at the moment that's on open season.
Edit.
I've made a quick adjustment that addresses the main points I made about the leaves; I found the "Insert Image" hieroglyph but then ran up against the problem that it appears that the image must be available on the internet, not on my computer...