They look a little dark on my computer too George.
Photographs on computer monitors are difficult to criticise, because not everyone has the gamma setting correctly calibrated. So, what looks good on one monitor may not translate exactly to another. Hence, you've already seen the result viewing your photos on two different computers.
As a rule of thumb, I tend to keep my camera settings to automatic exposure for general usage, without increasing or decreasing the exposure manually. I've checked the specifications of your camera, which are very impressive, and see you have an auto function, so give that a try. Try using one of your
'Scene Mode' settings. I notice that you have several of these - one for
beach and one for
flower being just two of them, so try using one of those. A beach scene is very contrasty, sun reflecting off the sand being very bright, yet other areas appearing darker, so if you manually compensate for one area then others could suffer. The auto function and specific scene modes usually do a pretty good job. That 'flower' setting sounds interesting, I'd definitely give that one a try.
There are times when this does not always work perfectly. Even professional photographers don't always get it right. This is where software intervention comes into play.
I use Photoshop Elements. This is basically Photoshop, with certain features disabled. Photoshop is incredibly expensive and very difficult to learn. Unless you're doing a lot of serious graphics work as part of your job, then it's not worth it. 'Elements' is very reasonably priced and does a fantastic job.
In Photoshop Elements, for example, you can enhance photographs that have very bright areas and very dark areas, by reducing the 'highlights' and putting some light into the dark areas, without losing quality or definition.
Obviously, not everyone has access to graphics software, but it's a bonus if you do.
I don't know what the lighting conditions were like when you took your photos, but there are little tricks you could try. If it is a very sunny day and you want to take photos of white flowers, then I would choose the time of day when the sun is at its least intensity. Midday is not a good time as the sun is directly overhead and VERY bright, and gives contrasty results - bright whites and dark shadows. Early morning or early evening are good times, as the sun is less intense and you get more muted and softer results.
If you're wanting to capture a flower that is a little bit in the shade, even though the sun is shining, you can use a white card to reflect the sunlight onto your subject. This will give a nice soft lighting effect without burning out the brighter parts of your flower.
Gamma correction on monitors is the other stumbling block, as I touched on earlier. It is very important to get it right, because no matter how careful you are to get the exposure correct on your camera for your photo, there's no guarantee that everyone will see it the same way. It can be very frustrating for someone to say your photos look terrible when they are viewing them on their uncalibrated monitor.
For anyone taking photographs to show on the forum, then I would recommend using a gamma calibration program. I use Photoshop Elements to calibrate my monitor, but there are free utilities available on the Internet. A Google search would be a good place to start. I haven't tried any of these free programs to be able to recommend anything.
The calibration isn't just a one-off either. Over time, as your monitor gets older, the calibration can alter so the test really needs to be done every two to three months.
Experiment with some of my suggestions. Take the same photo of a flower several times using different camera settings and see which ones give you the best results.
If you're really serious about it, there are also hardware options available which attach to the screen of your monitor. However, these are much more expensive than the software options.
If your photos look good on your own monitor, that has been correctly calibrated, then at least you know you've done the best you can to achieve lifelike colours, correctly exposed. CRT monitors will give slightly different results to the now more common TFT or LCD ones, the newer ones looking brighter. The monitor on my desktop PC is a CRT and Kathy's is a LCD. The same photo on my PC looks almost identical on hers, because the gamma calibration is correct.
I hope this info is useful George.
Laurie.
