my pictures are too dark - help :(

lotopauanka wrote:

here are those pictures.
Thank you for all your replies.

I try using auto but it sucks as well :/ that's why I'm concerned... Oo Maybe the camera is bad ;p? I was just randomly taking, some with my settings some on auto mode. See the white picture - I tried to capture marks on snow and used the close-up mode... ;/ then i tried to make it darker but didnt help, I just didnt post all the failures.
Thanks for help!!

Actually, apart from some of the mistakes the images are not that bad.

The second picture, even though it looks dark, is not that much underexposed for the sky. What you have to realize is that you take a difficult subject, you have essentially black trees on the left, and a very bright sky. A camera has a dynamic rang limitation, it can be difficult to get the whole range represented in one image, often the sky can be overexposed. I have just tinkered a little in photoshop using curves to brighten the mid-range a bit, and added a little sharpening.

You have to realize that with P&S cameras, what they do is to apply a lot of extra saturation and sharpening to the images to make them "snappier". I first was disappointed by the mute colors and "apparent" lack of sharpness of dSLR images as wel. The lack of sharpness is when you pixel peep at 100%l. But this is entirely on purpose. There is actually an anti-alias filter in front of the sensor to blur the image a little to avoid moire effects. So, you can always add extra sharpness and contrast etc. later, if you want to. But you can't retrieve information that is lost by overagressive treatment in P&S images. I bet the P&S shot would have blown the sky in this shot, unless it has an automatic HDR mode (which dSLRs don't really have yet, time something like that gets implemented).