Bizarre as it may seem, Rick, I would definately use a desat on the poor creature just to merge it more with the background.
Now it stands a bit apart...
A bit about channels. More will come later...
When you work in RGB, your image is composed of three separate groups of information. Red Green and Blue each have for each pixel in your image a specific brightness value out of a set of 256. Together these make your colour. (255,255,255 is all three at maximum which gives white; 0,0,0 is all three off which gives black; 255,0,0 gives pure Red, etc...)
Each of this groups of information is called a channel, and because each pixel is influenced, they are visible like images with 256 possible brightness values, that is: as greyscale images. Channels behave as greyscale images: you can use filters and adjustment on them.
So in your layers palette you can get a thumbnail view of each channel. You can also select one to make it visible by clicking on that eye icon. The top "channel" is the composite one which is not really a channel, but is used to show your image in full colour.
So the eye icon makes a channel visible, but clicking on its name selects it, which means that you can work on it.
Try this: open a white RGB doc. Make one channel visible and see that it's selected. You'll see the greyscale image on your monitor(in this case: pure white). Invert it (Image>Adjust>Invert). Now make the composite back visible by clicking on the top eye-icon. See?
Try this: keep the composite channel visible (eye-icon on) but select for example the blue channel. You see the full colour image on your monitor, here pure white. Now take a broad brush and paint on the image with black: only the blue channel is affected and you see that the blue is taken away: black is brightness zero, so the blue has a brightness of zero.
What do you see? LBJ on LSD?
It's a kind of magic...
You can also duplicate a channel so as to safeguard your valuable information.
You can also open an new channel. Becasue the engineers had to give this a name, they called it an alpha channel. (with CMYK you also have spot channels, but I leave these out for now).
When you select this by clicking on its name, you can draw on it like on any greyscale image, use filters (clouds, crystallize, Gaussian Blur,...), use gradients,...
And what's so fascinating about it is that you can load this alpha greyscale image as a selection.
You know a selection is used to tell PS which pixels that you want to apply your changes on. And a mask is exactly the opposite: a mask tells PS which pixels you want to protect.
You can save an alpha channel (which contains a greyscale image of your making that is used as a mask) with your PSD file and re-use it later by loading it as a selection.
The big advantage is that you can actually see what happens when you draw or compose your mask: a selection is only visible because of the marching ants, and these only give you a faint idea of what is happening as they don't show all of the greyscale values.
Try this: open a full colour image in PS (RGB mode).
Go to the Channels palette and create a new channel. See that it is selected by clicking on the Alplha1 name. But keep the composite channel visible.
Apply a gradient from black to white, circular. to the Alpha.
See what it does.
Now with the Alpha still selected, open the Levels dialog and change the settings. See how it influences.
Click on the load as selection button and observe where the marching ants exactly are: they don't show your entire selection.
Now apply some effect, for example Invert (that's always a very good one for a demonstration.
Have fun.
When you understand this, really got it into your system by practise and experiment, all them so called difficult ones like layer masks (works in the same way) and and adjustment layers suddenly loose their power, like a ghost that loses its blanket.
Edit
Re-reading this, I found it clear as mud...so I added quick image which is posted further on in this thread.