Brian,
This is too funny. The hands don't bother you, but the face and candle do and I'm just the opposite.
Dean,
I've allowed for a quite large file size to be uploaded, so I'm not sure why you're having problems. I recently increased this because you said you were having difficulty with the file size limitation. To figure out why you're having a problem, I'd have to know every step you're doing along the way. Or email me your original file before you did anything to it and let me examine that first.
As an example of what's possible, here's a portrait by one of my artists that is 20kb (20,000 bytes) and the quality is quite good. That's only about 20% of the original max file size I had set before I reset larger for you.