Improving a "keeper" photo

I am attaching two photos of a fun group of French “rowdies” who posed for me. You will find one edited versions along with the original. I’d like to end up with one photo cropped somewhat like the edited photo. Dimensions don’t matter. I like the cropped photo except that is disproportionately dark at bottom and light at top, it seems to me. The sky is virtually white. I'd love to darken it--whether to blue or storm gray I would leave to the editor. Darkening the trees would be nice, too. Unfortunately, there's a hand sticking up in front of the sky that needs to be left as is (masked, right?). I do not plan to sell the final photo, just display it, so I don't want to pay a lot of money. What can one of you do for $10 or less? FYI, I am just an amateur photographer. I save my files to Apple Photos, which I use to crop and do overall contrast/hue changes. But occasionally I have "keeper" photos I might like to print for amateur photo exhibitions. Those require more advanced editing, e.g., dodging, burning, line removal. In my youth I used actually wet photography darkroom, and later used Lightroom, which is nice, but I just don't want to reclimb the learning curve for the few photos I want to really spiff up. I am attaching four jpg phots of an Apple-Photos-edited file of a group of "French rowdies." Unfortunately, I did not shoot in RAW, though maybe I should, in future. What i would love to settle into now as my amateur photographer mode is to upload my photos into Apple Photos, do a bit of cropping and hue editing with its tools, but send out the two or three photos that "want" further custom editing to have them further for around $10 or less. These would be quick 10 minute fixes with Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. -- but I don't want to subscribe and relearn such tool do those fixes myself.