Agree, about sharing ideas.

One could not (and should not) invent a bicycle himself... tho venturing into experiments ofc is a good thing! but having cool 'working recipes' imo is a good thing too.

As for gradients: useful tool to use for certain sort of images... which, let say, 'poor' and benefit from adding such an extra... and also which have just a few huge color spots. When the image is picturesque and have a lot of different colors, color gradient is less useful (at least that s what I came to...)