Coffee in warm sun | texture tuesdays entry

Ta da! I present you my first ever entry into Kim Klassen Cafe's Texture Tuesdays:

If anyone wants to try this, I used PS Elements 8, so that's what my steps refer to. Here's what I did:

1. First I adjusted levels, color curves, and sharpened the original picture. Then the fun began...
2. Created a background copy layer and desaturated the color by -25. Adjusted opacity of desaturation layer to around 50%.
3. Added Kim Klassen's "warm sun" texture as a layer in overlay mode, adjusted opacity to 50%.
4. Added another layer of "warm sun," but this time I set the mode to lighten and adjusted opacity to 30%. 
5. Created layer masks for all three adjustment layers and cleared up the adjustments on the coffee mug, leaving the texture just over the background.

And there you have it.

For comparison, I'm including the original and another version using the "chamomile" texture instead of "warm sun:"

original picture

coffee mug with chamomile texture