re jpeg conversion:

I was going to say that if you have a Mac, you'd want to go with the
shareware "GIFConverter", for the PICT to JPEG conversion. It doesn't
have much in the way of editing features (other than scaling, flipping,
and whatnot) but it is "well behaved", and it does have a "slideshow"
feature.

Other than that, I'd also like to mention that since a lot of ray-traced
images tend to have a mechanically perfect sort of smoothness to them,
they suffer a lot from compression artifacts, when a high degree of
compression is applied, as compared to scans of snapshots of the real
world. You would see them mostly at the boundary between two hard-edged
objects, as a funny rippling effect. It's almost like television
ghosting. Other artifacts look like a tiling effect.

Very "busy" images that are heavily textured, with lots of turbulent
patterns, tend to hide these artifacts, and you can get away with more
compression.

Don't be afraid to try different degrees of compression with different
images, and compare them. You really notice them when you zoom in.

One thing I find is that the smooth, flat images look better in GIF
format, but then you might lose the space-saving benefit of higher
compression ratios.

-jr-

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