What is your monitor calibrated with? I have an lcd & crt that's calibrated w/ Colorvision's Spyder Pro. With both monitors, the pics are HEAVY on the contrast. It looks like you bumped the S-curve way too much!

Here's an edit w/ a slight bump on the S-curve.


Here's the same edit w/ a large bump on the S-curve.


**NOTE: Not the best example but the pic was on the desktop at the time.

 

love the wide angles, but these pics do look contrasty. One thing i learned from my photography class was to avoid shooting in direct sun-light or around mid-day. But to be honest, i like all the pics .

 

i like the pics as well!

 

wide angle looks really good

 

Nice

 

Great pics Jon. My car is in wintermode also, I just slapped my winter wheels on yesterday.

 

I use a LCD non-calibrated so that could be what some of the problem is. I also took shots during, pretty much, the completly wrong time to shoot. I should have waited another hour or so to get the sweet spot but it takes an hour to drive where I took the pics so I wasn't about to wait

A lot of the highlights are blown out due to either the pictures being shot in direct sunlight or half the shot in sunlight and half not so I kinda have to take an average between the 2 proper exposures. Both situtations are bad but its what I have to work with (in this case anyway)

As for the shadows loosing quality, I play with the offset exposure in photoshop. I kind of like that style, but thats personal taste. If I didn't play with them they would retain more detail.

Honestly, contrast I touched maybe +5 max in PS, never played with it to much. As far as the S-curve, I didn't even tweak it in these cases


Otherwise, thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to download a monitor calibration tool and see how that goes

 

IMO, shadow detail is very important, but if its not your thing than i guess that's cool... I just feel like its ruining some perfectly good pictures.

If you want, you can post up the original image and we can PS them, and try to explain how to maximize the light

 

Shoot in RAW. It'll also help fix the white balance issue in the last two shots taken in the shade.