In addition to big_hoovie's comments (actually, more of a supplement), Photoshop 5.5 and higher has a "Save for Web" feature. It'll display 2 or 4 (your choice) panes so you can see the orignal image next to a preview of the jpeg or gif and then tweak the compression to get the best quality/filesize ratio. It's one of those things that makes me wonder how I ever got along without. My other software tips are for the Mac, so they do you little good. But DeBabelizer is a great app for shrinking web grpahic's file sizes, and Graphic Converter is very nice too (and they're both much cheaper than Photoshop) One last thing: .bmp format is a pain for us in the design/print world. Please use .tif It's not compressed so you lose no quality at all (unless you intentionally use LZW compression, and you shouldn't unless absolutely necessary). TIFF is also natively cross-platform, and I think it supports more channels for masks and such. It's the standard format for continuous tone images (apart from .eps) in the printing world.