Butch,
The thread still rocks!
All this talk about programs for manipulating images, and licenses, and ease of use...
It's a shame the stuff I swear by doesn't have the full richness of the feature set available via popup menus in the graphical interface on Windows the way it does here, but everything is fully available via the command line in either case (and it's much quicker anyway).
I took the image attachment you'd put up, called "topper.jpg", saved it to disk, ran the command line:
<font face="fixed">convert -sharpen 0x1 -gamma 1.6 15933.jpg 15933.jpeg</font>
What did you say the other day? "Nothing but a thing, chicken wing." It took a couple of seconds to run on this old P-II 233 MHz box.
The result is attached.
Holler if you want help with the program.
Glen