Maybe I'm just not doing this right, but I am really struggling to get any reasonable quality in my image when I resize it to 650kb. I have sized my square image at 800 x 800 pixels which still leaves it larger than 650kb. Once I get it down to to 650kb the image is pixelated and looks awful. Any suggestions please??? Thanks

Hey Stephanie,

What is your current procedure?
Do you us photoshop?

Most of the time, it's pretty 'easy' to get a high quality image with a 650kb limit.. I was thinking to move that limit to 800kb to allow maximum quality tough.. what you think?

Hi Alain, sorry about the delay in resopnding.
Ok, this is what I have tried so far: I am using Photoshop CS2. Original image size is 4500x4500 pixels, cropped @ 15x15in, 300 pixels per inch, 57.9mb.
First I took the pixels down to 800x800 which automatically drops size to 2.7x2.7in and 1.83mb which is obviously still too large. Then I tried reducing pixels, size and pixels per inch in a number of ways and combinations until I reach the 650kb limit but always with poor results.
Any help would be appreciated.

Did you try the "save for web" option or do you just save it as a normal jpg?
Usually the export/save for web option works well in most cases.. you can even adjust the final quality of you image there.