I think I understand now. The images show a clear difference in the amount of blending of color hues and image sharpness...like there's more information in the normal compression image. Riptide looks interesting and I have PSP7 which has a "save to web" choice but I always thought that was poorer quality image. Maybe the best thing is for me to open a bmp file and try saving it at different compressions or give Riptide a whirl. Thanks for the links too!