Text over header and footer image -- too little contrast

A unusually nice contrib theme....

Though I find the theme more appealing and better designed than most, I think its hard to read the text overlaying the header and footer images. Considering the importance of those elements that's pretty critical.

This is not hard to improve with changes to text styling and some image editing (or replacement).
However, the theme would be far more readily useful (and thus useful to more people) with some improvements in the defaults.
I've reworked the images by combining reduced contrast and sharpness with darkening or lightening the text-overlay region.
I went the route of fading/lightening route on the images and combined that with vibrant red text.
That might still present some problems for people with color recognition limitations, but for most people it was far more readable.