What you see is what you get?

Last month I used my Canon 300D and Aquatica housing for the first time. I am very happy with the system, but also a little confused. After I took each picture, I reviewed it in the LCD to decide if it was fine, or if I should try different settings. A lot of them look very nice in the LCD: bright colors, good contrast and a beatifull blue background, therefore I decided to move over to a different subject. However when I went back home and loaded the pictures in the laptop, they did not look as impressive as I saw them in the LCD the first time. The colors were dull and quite dark.

With a 2-minute job in Photoshop (Auto Levels and Auto Contrast) the colors I saw in the LCD underwater were back. The image below shows the picture I took, and the corrected one with Photoshop.

Why does this happen? Is it because the settings I selected were not appropriate (15mm, 1/200 sec, f/6.3, Mode: Av, Metering: Evaluative, Exp comp: +2/3, ISO: 100, AF mode: AI Focus AF)?

Does this happen to other people, or it's just me because I am a lousy photographer? :oops:

Your comments would be appreciated

LCD on 10D (and on 300D also most likely) tends to show images as brighter than they are. Thus what looks good on the LCD often comes out underexposed. The histogram is a lot better for judging exposure than then LCD picture. Also, these cameras tends to produce pictures that benefit greatly from post-processing, so you would expect to have to spend a few minutes in photoshop to get them looking great.

BTW, it shouldn't be necessary to adjust contrast and levels - levels only should be fine (you're sort of doing the same thing twice). Personally I'd always adjust levels manually, it doesn't take long and gives you much better control over your image.

What Rob said.

I had the same problem as you did when shooting my new D100 in Fiji. The images looked good on the LCD screen but were actually too dark.

That is because when the camera comes out of the box, the LCD brightness is set for someone who is going to use the camera in bright sunlight. The picture is brighter looking underwater though, because it's dark down there!

First, you should lower the brightness of your LCD if the Dreb gives that option. Second, try shooting and looking at the histogram afterwards. If you can overlay it on the image, that's the best combo.

The histogram should not be all pushed to the left.

HTH

James