As you probably know, there are a lot of picture formats... If you want to save a picture and retain all of it's information, then save it as an eps: it will be rather large, but you got the original picture. Because of this format being so large, there are several compression formats, such as jpeg and gif. For instance, a jpeg doesn't save every pixel, instead, it saves a fraction of each (much larger) colored fact in your picture and it saves a calculation instruction for all pixels that should be that color. In other words, it recalculates a lot of the values upon reopening. So, yes, saving to jpeg leads to loss of quality. A gif also has lower quality but it's ideal for the web. beside this, you should realize that the max resolution the web provides you with is 72 dpi. Thank you, Scath, this was exactly what I was looking for as an answer. I had a feeling JPEGs did so, but now I know why. Thanks! You mentioned that gifs are ideal for the web? Why is this so?