Texture Thursday/LEM Photo Challenge: Leaves/Fall

The lovely and talented Ashley and Jill have teamed together to share their awesome photo editing tips and tricks; this week’s prompt/theme is leaves so I used a photo of a purple wildflower that I photographed on last weekend's trip to the Monjeau Lookout Tower in Lincoln National Park.  Here's what I did in Picnik:

1. Manually adjusted the exposure;
2. Manually adjusted the shadows to darken things up a bit;
3.  Under the advanced settings tab, I selected curves and then applied the dramatic sepia setting with both the color override and fade set to 0%;
4. Applied the Kim Klassen texture, water-stained frame, in multiply mode at 30%;
5. Applied the Kim Klassen texture, autumn burst, in multiply mode at 80%;
6. Cropped the photo and rounded off the corners.

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

I normally shy away from using textures on my photos because I'm always afraid of going too far with it and taking a perfectly fine picture and turning it into a hot mess, but I think I actually managed to strike a decent balance this time around.  What do you think?

In addition to Texture Thursday, I'm also linking this photo up to the LEM fall photo challenge--be sure to check out this week's other awesome entries by clicking below:

And don't forget--if you'd like to learn how to make your photos go from good to wow, be sure to check out what's going on over at Jill and Ashley's blogs: