Changing quality of photograph

I feel your pain brother! I have to try to produce *upmarket* work with low res and over-compressed images all the time. The jpeg artifacts at low compression are just horrible. One suggestion I have, which I've started doing recently goes like this: In Photopain there is a "touch up" tool in the red-eye reduction flyout. It adds slight blurs and acts as a sort of smoothing airbrush tool - great for quick on-the-fly blemish and wrinkle removal in portrait photos. It's also good for smoothing over those blocky jpeg artifacts. Because it's like a brush, not a filter, it's easier to smooth over the worst bits. But at the end of the day, you can't polish a turd. I'm doing a CD cover right now and the image I have is about 3cm's wide @ 72 dpi from a 1megpixel cellphone! So far I've experimented with duplicating the image 2 or 3 times, over-sharpening and over-blurring different layers and applying different blend modes... with some interesting results. I might post the two at some point as a comparison.