Plums on white

A slightly different starting photo and slightly different processing.
I'm enjoying playing with photos in this soft desaturated style and have discovered after many failures that choice of subject and background are very important and likewise light, soft indirect light seems to give the best results.
After much playing with textures, I think I've come up with a winning combination:-)

I duplicated the background to start with.
Using a Hue Saturation layer I reduced the saturation a touch.
then:
Burnished Clay @ Hardlight 68%
Sail cloth @ Overlay 55%
Sail cloth @ screen 7% (this layer probably could have been omitted)
Gosgrain @ screen 54 % desaturated to taste. I started off having this layer toned blue to give the finished image a slight blue hue but changed my mind at the last moment and opted for just slightly desaturating the green of the texture. A touch of texture was removed from the focus fruit.

....and yes, that's a cup ring you see on the original background (a piece of cardboard), textures are so good at covering up such things :-)

The above processing is very similar to what I used on my recent stone and bowl image on flickr.

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Plums

We have a self sown plum tree in our garden it produces fairly tangy, yellow fleshed plums with dark purple skins, in fact they look a bit like the Grand Duke plums that grew in the orchard on the farm where I grew up. Unfortunately our tree doesn't crop very well so I try not to let the plums go to waste, after I'd taken these photos I turned the fruit into plum sauce. The recipe I use is one my grandmother used to make; don't you love old family recipes like this?.With these plums it makes a wonderful dark red, tangy sauce.

Grandma's Plum Sauce
6 lb plums (I remove the stones to make the sieving easier at the end)
2 lb onions
3 lb sugar
3 pints vinegar (I use malt vinegar)
1 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground cloves
pinch of cayenne

Boil all together till soft, then put through a sieve or mouli/food mill. Bottle in clean hot jars.
Use as a condiment and also in cooking, it's great in marinades, casseroles etc.

Now the texture recipe!

Peach blush @ screen 35%
Backdrop @ multiply 72% desaturated to taste
Hue saturation layer remove most of the colour.
Dark blue colour layer @ screen 26%

Combo Pack Offer

Only $65 for Both texture Packs!