New (colour adjusted)
Latin name: Platycryptus sp.
Last night I used the GIMP to do more clean up an image I'd already posted to Flickr. The challenge was to reduce the visual influence of the blueness of the windshield on which the spider stands. The spider, thankfully, did not have any natural blue colouration, so turning down blue and magenta saturation accomplished this goal quite well. This allowed the subject to become much more visible relative to its background. Secondarily, I found that the Gimp allows one to define white and black reference colours in its colour spectrum selector tool. Doing this had the effect of removing a blue cast on the spider's white hair that I hadn't noticed earlier. It seems the camera's electronics where overwhelmed by the blue background and added the cast. In addition to removing the cast, the black/white baseline choosing made the whole picture more clearly defined.
I'm glad I've discovered the black/white baseline setting capabilities of the GIMP. It should help make my images much more attractive. I'm sure Photoshop does this very very well too. However, it costs $500.
