My questions to this list are not always directly "Linux technical." But I do always appreciate the patience and helpfulness of participants on this list. The current challenge tells me that I have forgotten everything I ever knew about graphics, and that was very little to begin with. I am not sure even what terms to put into Google to begin looking. So, besides answering the direct question, I would also say a big thank you to any reference to a good introduction to graphics aimed at an absolute beginner. Here is the task: my fiancee and I wish to use a musical score as the faint background underneath the text of our wedding invitations. If it is not misuse of a technical term, I would characterize our goal as using the image as a "watermark." The invitations themselves will be printed in colour on "invitation" stock (heavy paper / light card). My fiancee, who is not Linux-literate, found a graphic of the score she wants to use. I believe that what she originally found was a .jpg, but she saved it in a .doc file. I have not succeeded in finding the original .jpg on the web, but have extracted the image and saved it in both .jpg and .png formats. Because this is a graphical image of a musical score, it is literally "line art," with 100% contrast between the black image and the white background. My task is first to lower the contrast (saturation? - I wish I knew the terminology ;-(. ) to the faintness of a watermark. The second task is to apply the champagne (greenish gold) which we wish to use for the text itself. My gut feeling is that these two tasks are trivial, but I have blanked out on where and how to learn to do them. Let's put it down to the stress of planning a wedding. We will offer a "virtual piece of wedding cake" and many thanks to anyone with the patience to help us past this task. With thanks in advance. Bruce Miller -- Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada bruce [ at ] brmiller [ dot ] ca; (613) 745-1151 In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known. attributed to Thomas Pickering, retired US diplomat, born 1931