Desktop Background tips

Hi,

I changed my desktop background yesterday, and thought you may be interested in this trick I used. See, when you set a background you know you can choose to set a picture (you can have it in the middle of your screen, strecht it to fill your screen, have tiles ...) or set a gradient of 2 colo(u)rs (horizontally or vertically). But, did you know you can use a (semi-)transparant image and have the gradient shine trough it ? Maybe you did, if not, you'll have a lot of fun trying it out ;).

Here's a screenshot of my desktop:

(Click for the full sized-image.)

Now, I'll quickly explain how I set this up;

First, find some cool backgroundpicture. I found this great photo of a beautiful girl on the website of RubenV, someone I know from Gnome-NL. As I only wanted that girl on my desktop, I cut her out of the image using The Gimp as following;
I created a new canvas (File > New) with the dimensions of my desktop (which is the screen resolution) and a transparant background. Then I dragged the image I wanted to use from Nautilus on the canvas, right-clicked it to make the newly created layer as big as the image (Layer > To image-size), selected everything on the layer (Ctrl-A) and dragged it to the bottom right of the canvas as I want the girl over there on my desktop (tip: you can quickly zoom in/out on the canvas with the mousewheel, holding down the 'Shift' button, and scroll it horizontally pressing the 'Ctrl' button).
Then I picked the "free selection" tool (third tool-button). I set it up to use the first mode (create a new selection) and to use "Feather edges" with radius 100 (maximal). To change the settings, double-click the tool-button.
Then I selected the girl leaving enough space around her. Then I inverted the selection with Ctrl-I, removed the selection with Ctrl-X and saved hte result as a PNG-file.
Then I opened the Background-Properties dialog window, and dragged the file into it, set up some colors for the gradient ... and enjoyed the result. This all took me less then 2 minutes, and I'm sure that if I had some skills in Gimp'ing, it even would have been less :).

Ciao.