colour saturation i think.. help

pacman.podge

hey iv just recently got into photography and bought a new camera canon 1000d. when taking photos the colour upon the picture and lcd screen always seems to be duller.. or not as rich as it is when looking through the view finder or for that matter looking at it with the naked eye. is there any setting i can change to fix this. iv tried messing with scene types, exposure etc but i cannot seem to get the vivid colours (like fresh cut green grass in sunlight today)
also when taking photos in strong light the picture seems to over darken and under exposing it just makes it look crap... any ideas upon this?

Help is much welcomed

Thanks a million

davmigil

pacman.podge wrote: »

hey iv just recently got into photography and bought a new camera canon 1000d. when taking photos the colour upon the picture and lcd screen always seems to be duller.. or not as rich as it is when looking through the view finder or for that matter looking at it with the naked eye. is there any setting i can change to fix this. iv tried messing with scene types, exposure etc but i cannot seem to get the vivid colours (like fresh cut green grass in sunlight today)
also when taking photos in strong light the picture seems to over darken and under exposing it just makes it look crap... any ideas upon this?

Help is much welcomed

Thanks a million

Get the book 'Understanding Exposure' by Byran Peterson


Also have a look at HDR photography for capturing shots with wide exposure differences

Paulw

You've a lot to learn about photography, exposure and light.

There is no simple answer or quick fix.

For the dark/bright exposure, you need to understand what metering mode you are using (spot, matrix, evaluative, etc).

With the colours - are you shooting raw or jpg? What colour settings are you using? There are generally some custom functions in the camera that can be used to add vibrance to the images.

oshead

Unless you plan to display and view the images from your lcd screen all the time, then i wouldn't worry about it. How do the images look on the computer or when printed? That's all that really matters. If you are not happy with the way they look on other media, ie computers etc then you get into a whole new realm... Post production, PP for short. You should get into this.

The problem with taking shots in strong light is this. The image sensor dosn't like really bright light. It dosn't like really dark scenes either for that matter. The camera will always try to center the brightness/darkness of an image to an 18% grey. This means overly bright shots will get underexposed and overly dark shots will be over exposed. This is completely normal camera behavior. So with this knowledge you, as the photographer, need to manually make the adjustments. If you are shooting in full auto then it's not possible to make the necessary adjustments. My simple suggestion for you is to put the camera into P mode and check the manual on how to compensate the exposure. When you get used to this you could then change the metering mode to each of the three available and take some shots to see how the camera reacts to these changes.

Hope this helps.
David OShea

sprinkles

davmigil wrote: »

Get the book 'Understanding Exposure' by Byran Peterson


Also have a look at HDR photography for capturing shots with wide exposure differences

+1 for that book. I got it 2 years ago when starting out and found it very useful.

ThOnda

Not to mention that some cameras allow you to set how the preview image should be processed - saturation, sharpness, contrast... You see just a thumbnail processed in some way. If you shoot RAW, no worries, the data is there and you can get it from the file later during processing.