Temperatures were rising last week and the first crocuses popped out by Friday... As I even managed to get out on Saturday afternoon, I'll be posting a few more flower shots in the next days!

And since all upcoming images are somehow related to Spring, I'm introducing a new "Spring" tag today!

Other detail that should be mentioning: I've been struggling with "artifacts" arising from the Gimp's gaussian blur filter for quite some time! When this filter is run on very uniform image regions (such as very smoothly blurred backgrounds) and more post-processing (such as contrast stretching) is applied afterwards, this (because of the Gimp's 8-bit limitation) often results in ugly posterization effects becoming visible through bigger brightness steps. I managed to reduce this effect by including a simple colour dithering algorithm in the IIR method of the gaussian blur filter. Results are looking great, so this is a big relief for me as it simplifies post-processing quite a lot!