I've got some adolescent trees that I haven't kept up with and would like to know if it is a good idea to try to train these branches to grow at different angles. I've never done this before, but I see there's branch spreaders, rubber bands, and tree weights (of all sorts, mostly DIY). I've read the branch spreaders can cause some damage - ? has anyone used spreaders sucessfully. Would these even work with these larger trees? These rubber bands (link) look like they might work for my young, pliable fruit trees, but probably not for these two larger trees.

Here are the two trees that need attention:

1. River birch. You can see that the two trunks aren't crossing, but they're right smack next to one another, and a wound has formed on one of them from the rubbing. I don't want to remove one of the trunks, I thought if I could pull the one away from the other I could avoid doing that.

The two kissing branches are right in the front (the stakes are to keep the deer from rubbing):

A higher-up view: The two kissing trunks are on the left, the one I want to pull down is in the front -- looks like the curved part of a bow:

2. Apricot tree: The tall limb on the left side has leaned too strongly to the right. What I want to do here is train it to go more to the left to get a more shapely form so it doesn't look the whole top is leaning.

Side note: IDK whether I should take off those two lower limbs (one on the right, one on the left). What do you think?

Side note #2: I'm not concerned about optimizing fruiting, this is more of a landscape specimen, any fruit is an added bonus; priority here is a shapely tree.

Appreciate any insight you can offer about training branches.