Washed up photo's + saving them

It's harder to save over-exposed pictures than under-exposed (for me, anyway--other people might have different experiences). You'll probably have to play with levels in Photoshop to salvage the pictures as best as you can. It also depends on how over-exposed the pictures are, too, with how salvageable they are.

 

Do you have any examples of what you mean?
Do you mean the colours look different online then they do when you're editing them? There could be a few reasons for that so narrowing it down would help ^^

 

What are the settings? Is the camera on Auto? Is the white balance on auto? Is the focus manual or auto? Sometimes, when you have certain things on auto (like white balance) you can't get what it is you want, because the camera is disagreeing with you. Is situations like that, try manually doing everything.

 

Let's try and figure this out. Do I understand it correctly that there is no such effect WHILE you shoot and WHILE you process the photos, but WHEN you save the file and open it in Windows Browser or upload to Internet, the effect is suddenly there?
OR is it that you open the photo and suddenly see the washed-out colors in Photoshop?
If the first applies, could you give an account of how you usually process the photo and the way you save it? This might provide a lot of insight.
If the second is more correct, then what settings on your camera do you use? I also have a Nikon DSLR, perhaps we can find the answer.

 

The only time that my pictures turned out different than it look in photoshop after i uploaded it, is when I took it in RAW and saved the edited photo as JPEG...but you said you have it in JPEG so im not sure what happened...

as for the M and S setting on your camera, you need to change the shutter speed or aperture so your pictures won't turn out black. M = Manual mode (shutter speed and aperture are under your control), S = Shutter priority

 

I got logged out while typing this ^^;;

OK, first the black then. This usually happens when the shutter speed is too high - the camera shoots, but too little light gets in. M and S allow you to manipulate the shutter speed, and the default amount is too little for the camera to get enough light. Try adjusting the speed (look up in your user's guide, there's a detailed explanation on how to do it ^_^). If changing this doesn't help, visit your local Nikon support - perhaps there's something wrong with the camera itself.
Try switching to the A (depth of field control) setting, it allows a bit more control than P as far as I can remember (I only use S and A, but I do recall struggling with P when I first received the camera).
Now the washed out bit. The ISO and image settings seem to be OK for the light. But the white balance could be the culprit. As someone mentioned above, the camera doesn't always agree with what we are seeing, so I prefer to adjust the white balance manually. Choose according to the light (incandescent, cloudy, direct sunlight, etc.) and make a couple of trial shots to see what the camera is doing. Then adjust according to your preferences or the lighting conditions. Also, see if you can get the depth of field slightly higher - I know that it helps with white dolls that suddenly start shining (like the first shot).

A couple of tips for post-processing. Lower the highlight levels slightly while deepening the shadows and see what this brings you. Try the curves function in Photoshop, and the shadows / highlights function could also come in handy (make sure you have a tick for "show all options" selected to get better control, then lower the amount of shadow, slightly increase the amount of highlight, tonal width and radius - play with these and the lower part to see what this brings you). Also adjust saturation manually if your camera continues to play tricks on you.

And uploading to the Internet is best done through a service where you can see what is being done to the image. I know that automatic processing tends to lower the image quality to make "an optimized" image even more optimized.

 

It kinda appears that you lens needs to be clean. it there enough fine dust on it, the flash will refract the light and less detail is captured. Using rubbing alcohol tend to work the best with a q-tip.

 

How old is the cam? it just might need a tune up, or a new one. As cam get old, sometime the internal componts need to be clean for the seam of the cam pet dust in, which results in refacted light! Refracted light = wired color and loss of details.

 

Almost a year ago, I suggest you get it tuned up, if it a full digital, maybe try updating the frimware for it. Small banging around in a bag or pocket or loose in a case can dis-aline the internal hardware. I have to get one of my cam tune up before for that problem!

 

I have one more question - could it be that the camera was used / left in a humid place for a while? Not dropped into water, naturally. I live in a very humid climate and the guy at the store told me that sometimes the water that's in the air gets into the camera, which can result in blurred or discolored images like that.
And one more thing... check if the color setting is still sRGB in the camera and in PS or whichever image-editor you are using ^_^;
The shot does have a very sweet effect ^___^

 

That why i suggested the tune up, opening up the case and having it clean can fix that!

 

I KNOW HOW TO SAVE YOUUUU~ DDD8
..I've had this problem when uploading pics to flickr and deviantART, and it's been driving me absolutely MAD.
What I did was change the file to 16bit, and then save optimised/save for web and devices as jpeg.

Here's the same picture;
Left - saved normally at 8bit
Right - saved optimised/save for web and devices, and changed to 16bit.



Let me know if this works for you D:

 

One possibility struck me — you might check what the camera's colour space is set to.

If it has been set to Adobe RGB, this would result in washed out colours. Setting it back to sRGB would solve the issue.

Alternatively, if you had been shooting in RAW, and your software had been set to extract Adobe RGB out of the images instead of sRGB, this would have yielded the same result. As you're shooting in JPEG, the setting will be in the camera.