It was suggested by both MFC and Sonny that I replace this with a wider, longer version I had posted elsewhere. In addition, MFC kindly spent a lot of time (seeing how I'm very PS-challenged) trying to explain to me how I could brighten up the background; he had sent me an example, so I had that to use as a model. I spent literally hours on several evenings trying to reproduce what he had so effortlessly done (without success, I might add :-)), but this is the best I could do: http://www.pbase.com/stfchallenge/image/53210136

I used PSCS2 to select the background, with the polygonal lasso (a first for me). That was the hardest part -- I could barely see some of the full branches and kept cutting them off. I next feathered it to 40 (MFC had suggested 30, but I found I liked effect of 40 better). Then I increased brightness by about 50 on the left side and 75 on the right, followed by increasing contrast to about 20 on both. That was pretty much it, except for learning how to do an exterior border by increasing the size of the canvas. Oh, and I learned from my friend Rob at work how to play with the text in layers. No kidding, I didn't know how to do any of this stuff before!