Folks I seem to have an annoying issue with my Pentax DSLR.. When I take low level light pictures either using flash or not the lighting in the pictures turn out great, but when I take daytime pictures outside and in the sunlight they seem to be VERY dim.. which then forces me to fix with Photoshop CS3 to make the pictures look nice and bright. I shoot only in RAW but it seems the camera it's self is not taking advantage of the natural light of the sun!! What am I doing wrong here?? Are filter's a MUST?

Post some pictures with the exif intact so we can see the problem. What mode are you using?

Sometimes I just use "Auto" to be quite honest because I usually don't have the patience to mess with manual settings..






I can't figure out how to keep the information in the file but .... if you can see what I mean.. "Before" ...




"After" ...






I'll keep looking for better examples.. it's farely suttle but to me VERY obveous...

PERFECT EXAMPLE... Was a beautiful day and look at this.. no editing..

Might be easier to point people to your Flickr stream if it's public. The EXIF data might be there.

There aren't any exif in those pictures. But really--solution is to get out of auto mode and learn the camera.

Photo stream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesb2007/?s...photo2673787773

The EXIF for the first photo is:



For the second photo:

Well thank you!! LoL..

I'm gonna be honest, your second edited photo looks "too bright". The first one is a bit more natural because of the darker sky/water. It does look hazy--increase the contrast or use curves for that.

All filters actually reduce the amount of light going into the camera.

I shoot only RAW, and a good chunk of my RAW shots need to be brightened while 99% of them need some kind of other adjustments. That's just how RAW works. When you shoot in JPG, the camera does all the RAW editing for you right away.

Your initial pictures look correctly exposed. That's all auto does, take all the information going in, and produce a picture that is averagely well exposed across the ranges (shadows, midtones, highlights)

You just need to learn how to use your camera in Manual mode to get better looking pictures.