Digital image editing is so cool.
I like to change my computer’s desktop background quite often, just to keep things in flux, and it’s important that whatever I use is either fairly dark, or has large regions of solid color. As the screenshot below shows, when I’m doing programming work (which is much of the time) my text “floats” on the desktop. It’s terribly hard to read against a background that’s bright or noisy.
So I had a nice mountain picture– lots of trees, snow, and blue sky– but there were a lot of clouds that made it hard to read text against it. I just pulled it into the GIMP, selected everything above the mountains, and worked out a nice blue gradient that makes it look like a gorgeous cloudless day. Voila!
