Fire--folks using programs that have licenced this technology don't have to worry about this particular problem (Photoshop users need not be alarmed). This has been more of a concern with freeware and shareware developers who create image programs who have not licenced that particular image format. I'm assuming that Metacreations licenced that particular technology for Poser--so we should be safe. One web design trick to compressing the size of a JPEG is to blur the image before saving it. This is because JPEG is most efficient with gradual shifts in color, not contrasts. The 8-bit image is best for grayscale, or for a texture that only represents a few colors (like a simple color logo). The thing I don't like about JPEG for flat color fields and grayscale is that you will still suffer some generational loss if you need to change a JPEG copy of the original, and that it saves 256 or a 32 color images as if they actually contained millions of colors, and then the program reading the JPEG will be forced to process the image as if it had millions of colors as well. I prefer PICT image files over bitmaps and GIFs--the PICT format seems to handle a wider range of color depth much more effectively than the BMP. There's usually a huge difference in the resulting file sizes and PICT compression is lossless. The reason I'm asking about the GIF format is that it seems the most cross platform friendly way to share texture maps that only require a few colors.