Could someone tell me how to convert to jpg from illustrator or photoshop and retain decent quality...When I rasterize the image to jpg, in order to keep it small enough for download, it really gets fuzzy. I'm pretty new to this, so any help would be really appreciated.

you could press file->save for web, if you want it very small, but it will be lower quality
also, simply using file->save as, then choosing from the drop down list, jpeg as your filetype, then saving, it'll then come up with another window asking you to choose the quality. Choose your quality and it will calculate a file size and show a preview of the image at this quality (the main image in photoshop will change). Choose what suits u, press ok.

Try Jstrip. It takes high resolution JPGs (1600x1200) and eliminates much of the information the image doesn't need to upload/download. Here.

File>Save for web. When the window opens go to Optimize Menu>Optimize to file size and type in the value.

Well first thing! When you save in PhotoShop as a JPG. It offers you the ability to decide the quality of JPG. You wish the lower the compression and the higher the quality selector the better the image. Also, consider setting the progressive at 4 to 5. That should help. But you must realize that every time you change an image and save in a JPG. The image degreases in quality and becomes a pourer quality. So what I suggest is first converting the image to a Tiff’ so to do any type of changes in a tiff until you complete the image. There is no loss of quality in Tiff. Then convert the image to JPG only when the image is completed. Another route is use a GIF file to save and send the image over the web. Most sites will accept a GIF. And there is less to little loss of quality.

Thanks for all the input...I'm learning a lot :)

prismmagic: Your advice concerning the GIF format seems a bit misguided since GIF uses an indexed pallette and most images here contain far more than 256 colors.

Very True. Mr Caedes But the major concern of the person was quality loss. I personaly wish that site did have the storage to upload TIFF.

If anything I'd prefer PNG though.

whats the difference between tiff and png? i know they're both complete quality with a ton of colours, but whats the diff?

PNG (Portable Network Graphics). That image format was originally designed to replace GIFs. Although it has been an official Internet image type since 1996, its adoption on the Web has been surprisingly slow. It can handle truecolor graphics (millions of different colors). PNG compression is lossless, which means that unlike JPEGs, there is no degradation of image quality. PNG is an Open Source image format, so you can use it however you want. All major browsers can currently view PNGs. If you use IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.04 or greater, there shouldn't be any problems. The several lesser used browsers, such as Opera, Amaya, and Mosaic, also view PNGs. For more info go here .

The advantage of PNG over TIFF is the smaller file size (higher compression ratio).