I think this is what I am running into. I picked up a link to a place called usenet gallery from a post Flora made a while back and I'd love to practice on all these images but they are so packed with this compression artifacting that it makes it frustrating.

Does anyone no an easy way, or hard way for that matter, to get rid of this stuff?

I think you are referring to the "Eldorado" gallery which is now at http://gallery.use.net.ru/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?misc Although the posted image sizes are all pretty much the same, many of the images do have bad artifacts but some are a lot better than others.

If you are looking for portraits, try "Peoples" pages from from number 19 on. There are some good ones around there.
Here is one of my Before/Aftertests from that page.

Rô

That's a nice job on the retouch. I had noticed after I sent the post that some of the images are in pretty good shape. I love the site as it gives you plenty of screwed up images to work on.

I am still interested in whether or not there is a way to fix the damaged ones. First off, am I referring to it with the right term? Compression artifacting is what that is called, correct? Second, I would just like to know if it's possible to do anything with it? I have seen many images that I would love to take a stab at but are too damaged to bother with. Oh, and that is the site I was referring too. Thanks

Ro has a few tutorials HERE (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=150) on the subject. I mostly use filters such as Topaz Dejpeg (http://www.topazlabs.com/topazlabs/03products/topaz_dejpeg/) and Neat Image (http://www.neatimage.com/) to eliminate the bulk of the artifacting but I stiil prefer to manually touchup very detailed areas of an affected image because I find the filters soften out these areas too much.

you can also try filters within Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. 'jpg artifact remover' is the one in psp. you can also try the median filter or psp or ps's own denoisers. psp's is excellent.

craig

I have never tried the median filter on it but I do have neat image and whatever I am doing doesn't do a darn thing to it. Neat Image will end up blurring the whole thing as stated before it fixes the artifacting.