kat -

Results you get from the "Fugi" will, of course, depend on how good your image files are. If the bits ain't there, no printer in the world can put them back in.

When you get ready to have prints made, I'd suggest a "small order" until you see that your files have come through the conversions in good enough shape to justify the cost of "high resolution" printing.

There are some pretty good "photo quality" printers available now, at quite reasonable prices (under $200, or even significantly less). As with so many good things though, the real cost comes after you get them home. The "photo quality" paper can approach $1 per sheet in "modestly large" sizes, and many of the "photo quality" printers have such small ink cartridges that a couple of 8x10 glossies (or a very few 5x7s) can eat $30 worth of ink. They can make very good prints, though.

Cluin -

In the ideal world, you'd like to have bitmaps for all your pictures, but if you get them from the web or from most consumer level cameras they're gonna come out as jpegs. In a lot of cases we're just stuck with that, as a starting point at least. The one rule that must be kept in mind when working with them is "NEVER save back in the original file," since you'll recompress and lose more information each time you do.

There is a pretty "active commerce" in jpegs that are too big to be useful (or at least necessary) for screen display but are small enough to be sent around the web - and that do give very good images - at reasonable enlargements.

The Photoshop "native" format (PSD) is, theoretically at least, "lossless," and for the amount of information it saves is very compact. I'm not sure that the same can be said about quite a few of the other "proprietary" formats, but fortunately I've eliminated quite a few of those other programs since I picked up on Photoshop Elements. Just wish I could afford the whole "real" Photoshop setup.

John