Hi arsheesh, thanks for the quick reply! I had noticed the HSV noise as well and got it taken care of in some test forests I did this morning - the problem was that hitting "delete" on the Mac version of Gimp appears to do nothing. I saw the update after I posted for the harder edges and I'll give that a shot today. As to the fluffiness, whenever someone says they followed the directions to the letter you know they didn't. While the clouds were "turbulent", I noticed that in Step 1: 3.a I had moved the right arrow, not the left, to 85. This seems to have solved my problem! Thanks again for your help and for the tut, which when actually followed, works great.