oops, make the file size smaller,

I'm not a wallpaper artist myself, but here's what I would do. After you've rendered your image, open it up in Photoshop (or some graphics editor), save it as a JPG, and adjust the image quality setting until you find a good balance of quality and file size.

That's basically it. Like Mike said if you use a graphics editor like PS or Paint Shop Pro you can reduce the file size considerably without visible image loss. Different colors allow for more compression too. You might find a predominantly red or orange wall will handle a higher compression setting than a predominantly blue or green one. Emperiment with the compression settings. An average 1280 x 1024 wall should not need to be larger than about 500k to look good. BMP's will always be a lot larger but they zip well so you could experimant with zip compressions too if you like to post bmp's.

We upload .bmp files in the zips. Hmm...do most folks prefer the .jpg format for their desktop walls? It's kinda hard deciding on sacrificing clarity for filesize.

thanks 4 u'r advice mike, and david. i've been uploading .bmp because i thought we were supposed 2, i'll b uploading .jpg from now on.