beefstu,
Thanks for the kind words. I actually toned down the brightness and adjusted the contrast on the images to a degree. Without that, I was seeing spots!

I was trying to find a happy place between neon "my eyes are melting" green and too dim that the detail in the strands was lost. I also use a crt as my main monitor - can't afford to switch, and it works just fine. I probably have my monitor adjusted wrong...
Carl,
I noticed that too, but not sure why. Maybe it is an optical illusion caused (in my case) by the Personas theme I use in Firefox. I try to keep it to a darker theme because the brighter, artsy ones seem to make it difficult to concentrate on the actual image in the browser most times.
Now that I've had my ego somewhat inflated, take a look at the one I uploaded to LinuxMint-Art.org. Very simple green on black that will be in my wallpaper rotation for LM9 Isadora. Someone commented in another thread about preferring actual pictures over abstract art, so this is a modified from a photo of an actual sprig of spearmint, and some text in a modern-style font - and a bit of a salute to both the Beatles and LinuxMint along the way.
http://linuxmint-art.org/content/show.php/Cool+Mint+Number+9?content=123671
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.21GHz, 2GB RAM, Galaxy NVIDIA 9500GT, Foxconn Winfast 6150BK8MC mobo, dual-booting LinuxMint r9 (Isadora), Vista Ultimate 64-bit.