Sounds of the City - San Francisco, CA

Are there any web sharpening gurus out there? It's really nice to be able to share photos online and have them look exactly like they do on your computer screen at home. Unfortunately most sites compress your uploaded photos down to a maximum size which in turn really degrades the image. Due to this fact I find myself uploading to most social media sites at a maximum of 900 pixels wide lately, although I would really like to upload much bigger, say 2048 pixels wide.

The only place I really upload full size anymore is to Smugmug which holds my photo portfolio. They have some pretty good web functionality that sharpens your picture depending on the size at which it's being viewed. This allows me to upload my full resolution image and still get pretty good results no matter what size I view it at. I have noticed even Smugmug's sharpening is not quite as sharp as the real thing as viewed on my computers screen. If you have Smugmug you can turn on this functionality by going into your gallery settings and changing the sharpening amount from 0.200 to 0.400. That seems to do the trick, at least for me. That being said, if you really want to view my pictures in full detail instead of viewing them on this page, go ahead and click the picture below to see it over in my portfolio.

I personally love using TK Actions Web Sharpening Tools ( select "Special Offers" upon clicking the link to pick up a copy of your own ) to get my photos ready to post online. I recently found a video Sean Bagshaw posted about using these actions that's really informative for anyone that wants to give it a shot.


The Shot
This is one of those iconic locations that everyone seems to have a shot of. Usually I stray away from this sort of location, but once in a while it's fun to give them a run. We had a tricky time getting down there and encountered some signs and warnings along the way, but none the less here is one of the shots I came away with...

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