WLC, First, it is easiest to squeeze detail out of an image when you scale down the size or compress it. It is impossible to adaquately replace that data when you enlarge an image, although PhotoShop will try to guess at what the intermediate pixels should have been. However, a guess is a guess, and some machine's idea of average isn't anything like the chaos of the real world. Render and work in a resolution larger than your finished image. (Set the "units" in PhotoShop, or whatever paint programs you use, to pixels rather than inches or cms.) For example, suppose that you want your final image to be 600 by 800 pixels. Work at 900 X 1200 or even 1200 X 1600 or whatever resolution your machine can handle. Good high quality texture maps will be larger than this! After you have finished tweaking the image, you can always shrink it down to final size... saving under a new name! You may want to go back and change something later, so having the full-size full-detail image stored safely away will save you grief and much gnashing of teeth. Always work and render and paint in a non-lossy, non-compressed format. I prefer tifs with alpha channels and masks and lots of layers so that I can play with the seperate elements. Others prefer bmps. I used to work in pcx format because it was the easiest to translate to all the other formats including cross-platform stuff like sgi. If you are working as part of a team, find a format which is acceptable to all of you and the compiling software. Do not work in jpgs. Period. That is an excellent final format for those times when you need quick loading of an image (an ebay auction or thumbnail to a gallery or a contest entry here). However, it gets its speed by analyzing the range of values in your image and shmushing the colors to retain the relative brightness data. If you need to have a jpg image, always save your real image off in another format and another name first. Once that data is gone, you can never get it back. Well, almost never. PhotoShop has backstepping. :) Another tip... machines do corrupt data. Computers crash and hang by their toes during the final render. People overwrite a file when they are tired and under deadline. It happens. I save in a 3-name rotation while working on a project (each save is under the next name in the cycle). Back in 1990, an Amiga ate an animation which had taken me 3 days... despite my saving every 10-15 minutes... under the one name. ::grrrr:: Nice machine, but I've never forgotten how it felt to lose those 3 days. Besides the rotation, I'll save out various versions at key moments or steps (use logical names), and these key versions usually get on a Zip disk. Back in '95 I had a hard drive go belly-up, and had to watch the techs try to retrieve my data. I had backed-up on tape, but the PC had been corrupting the data for some time. So, save often, save under non-lossy formats, save under different names, and occasionally save on something outside the computer. Carolly