Joe,

I guess you could call it touching them up. I use Deskscan to scan the chips. Then I adjust the image size to 158x158 and "zoom" the chip. I let the program pick the right "exposure", then I usually increase the "highlight" slider bar by two clicks (a value of 20).

My kludge for fixing the "white" are around the chip was to use a white background in my CyberGuide. <g>

I agree, .gif files are almost always smaller.

Greg