[el chupacabra]

Some people's hawaii pics look like this:

http://www.portpromotions.com/portim...r%20region.jpg
http://relaxury.com/Hawaii1.jpg
http://www.moneyweek.com/~/media/Mon...h=304&bc=white
more awesome photos:
http://www.pbase.com/merriwolf/latest

Mine tend to look more like these with the washed out sky:

http://static1.travelandleisure.com/...9-b-hawaii.jpg
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/ge...awaii_nice.jpg
http://www.hawaii-top-ten.com/image/new-waterfalls.jpg

railroader always says it's not the camera that takes bad pictures but the user. I know a simple solution is to take pictures in the evening or morning using the sun as a back light; however Im noticing many people take pics in the middle of the day with them turning out fine. I know they're not masking/photoshoping the sky in with every photo, that's too time consuming and doesn't ever look right anyway. How do you just take an unwashed out photo to begin with?

[reader50]

You need a camera with a wide dynamic range. DSLRs have wider range than most compacts. The problem is the sky is too bright compared to the foreground subjects - if the camera does not have the range to include both, the sky will get clipped. Along with anything else that is too bright after the camera adjusts for the subjects.

You can fake it by shooting brightly lit subjects, but anything dark in the picture (shadow under a tree for example) will get clipped to black. It is a camera sensor problem.

[ort888]

Get your light reading from the sky not the foreground. It's hard to do with a point and shoot.

[turtle777]

The iOS 4's HDR camera function will help.

Even better, get an app like Pro HDR.

-t

[el chupacabra]

I have the new sony nex slr like camera. It has the large sensor but the pics are only slightly better. Is there any specific settings that make the difference?

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by el chupacabra 

I have the new sony nex slr like camera. It has the large sensor but the pics are only slightly better. Is there any specific settings that make the difference?

Most likely not, though ‘outdoors’ and ‘bright’ settings are usually at least somewhat better than the default standard mode.

If possible, like ort888 said, measure the light based more on the sky than the subjects. The subjects will likely end up looking a bit dark, but that’s a lot easier to fix afterwards than a blown-out sky. If you’re taking pictures of people and you’re able to control the flash on your camera (I don’t know if that’s possible on the Sony NEX), you can also take the picture with a flash on, while basing the light on the sky. That way, the overall light in the scene will be based on the sky (i.e., the camera will be very insensitive to light, and it’ll take bright light, like the sky, to get normally exposed colours); meanwhile the foreground subjects—who would normally be way too dark with such low light sensitivity, since they’re a lot darker than the sky—are illuminated by the flash and become more or less correctly exposed. This does depend on being able to control the flash, though, which seems to be rather rare for on-board flashes. If you can only set the flash to ‘on’ or ‘off’, chances are it’ll be several orders of magnitude too powerful, and you’ll end up with the foreground too bright instead.

Also, if you can, keep the Sun in your back. If the Sun gets anywhere in the shot, it’ll throw the light completely off balance and you’ll either have foreground subjects that are totally black, or a sky that’s totally white.

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by ort888 

Get your light reading from the sky not the foreground. It's hard to do with a point and shoot.

^^^Mostly this^^^

Hold on, let me go snap some shots before the sun goes down.

[Oisín]

RR, if you’re going to post a thorough explanation with pictures as illustrations, could you do it in the photography tips sticky thread and just link to it from here? That would be great (and add a bit more to a very useful thread).

[Laminar]

I've heard something about polarizing lenses before...

[ghporter]

From a technical standpoint, I want to add to reader50's point: the camera needs a wide dynamic range-but for both brightness and color. Not all sensors are good at quantifying the difference between two colors that are close together-as in the second picture's difference between the middle of the sky and the water directly under it. Color range will help you get the saturation you want, but you also need wide brightness range to be able to capture details in lower lit areas. The kicker is that it isn't all the sensor that's responsible for this stuff. The camera's logic processes the raw data (even just going to RAW format) and uses camera settings to filter that raw data, so some cameras can make much better pictures than others with basically the same sensor.

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

RR, if you’re going to post a thorough explanation with pictures as illustrations, could you do it in the photography tips sticky thread and just link to it from here? That would be great (and add a bit more to a very useful thread).

Not the best work I have ever done, but here it is: http://forums.macnn.com/83/art-and-g...s/#post4017606
The sun had actually set, so it is not a very good example, but it does kind of show what others have said on here earlier. The key is where you meter the capture.

Originally Posted by Laminar 

I've heard something about polarizing lenses before...

Yes, for landscapes with big sky views, a polarizing filter (if not overdone) will yield the best results.

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

From a technical standpoint, I want to add to reader50's point: the camera needs a wide dynamic range-but for both brightness and color. Not all sensors are good at quantifying the difference between two colors that are close together-as in the second picture's difference between the middle of the sky and the water directly under it. Color range will help you get the saturation you want, but you also need wide brightness range to be able to capture details in lower lit areas. The kicker is that it isn't all the sensor that's responsible for this stuff.

Most sensors, including in a modest point and shoot, have pretty wide dynamic ranges.

Originally Posted by ghporter 

The camera's logic processes the raw data (even just going to RAW format) and uses camera settings to filter that raw data, so some cameras can make much better pictures than others with basically the same sensor.

Well... not really. RAW, in essence, is what the camera saw. Some data is passed onto the software regarding some settings such as white balance, but you can zero those out and get exactly what the sensor captured. If you capture in manual with WB set to sunlight and all other setting set to neutral, you'll have a good starting point for fine image work.

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by el chupacabra 

Some people's hawaii pics look like this:

http://www.portpromotions.com/portim...r%20region.jpg
http://relaxury.com/Hawaii1.jpg
http://www.moneyweek.com/~/media/Mon...h=304&bc=white
more awesome photos:
Latest Photos Photo Gallery by Gordon W at pbase.com

ALL of those above have been post processed to make the sky bluer. The links from the pbase gallery aren't as bad, but the others are horrendous.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Railroader 

Most sensors, including in a modest point and shoot, have pretty wide dynamic ranges.

Wide, but not necessarily uniform. Sensors can pick up say indigo and dark blue and violet all at once, but not all sensors, even in "good" cameras, can produce the same differentiation between these close values; sensor color bias is a characteristic of individual sensor designs, and the A-D processor used with an individual sensor will adjust individual sensor pixel color data to make it more uniform.

Originally Posted by Railroader 

Well... not really. RAW, in essence, is what the camera saw. Some data is passed onto the software regarding some settings such as white balance, but you can zero those out and get exactly what the sensor captured. If you capture in manual with WB set to sunlight and all other setting set to neutral, you'll have a good starting point for fine image work.

In addition to pre-processing color data, A-D processors can differ in their A/D algorithm and bit depth, which affects color representation. White balance is more "range adjustment" than "processing," but it affects both brightness and color encoding. ISO setting also requires processing before producing the RAW image file.

I'm not nit picking, just providing a little background for my point of view in my earlier post. I've always been a hardware guy, and these details make a difference to me. The output of the sensor really isn't available until it's been processed at least a little, usually a lot. Of course I may have "bought the marketing line" with saying some cameras could produce "much better" pictures than others with essentially the same sensor. Without access to what the A-D processor sees, there's no real way to quantify how two different implementations using the same sensor differ-what you get out is necessarily a product of the whole camera.

Techy dweeb is shutting up now...

[Wiskedjak]

One other thing I've noticed: some people, when noticing how white the sky is in their photos, don't realize that the day was very hazy when they took the shot. People remember overcast skies, but they seldom seem to notice light haze, where they sky is blue overhead but white at the horizon where our cameras are pointed.

[Railroader]

A polarizing filter will reduce that significantly.

[Railroader]

Posted newer pictures to make the point clearer.

[wyatt]

The bets answers are all here.

First and foremost, circular polarizing filter....

Without a polarizing filter and then with...


Again...


Big difference, huh?

You want the circular kind, linear polarizers are for more manually adjusting to a specific situation.

Other suggestions of taking the light readings from the sky and post processing are huge help as well.

BTW, sorry to butt in, i've been away from macnn for a while (my mac pro is 1.1 and there isn't much new info about it these days), but I did want to see what others were saying about 10.7, so I'm looking around.

[Oisín]

BTW, sorry to butt in

By all means, butt away! That’s what forums are for, after all: butts.

[Veltliner]

Looks like the washed out images of the OP were made in a completely different light (with overcast sky).

Or he shot it with such a bad camera with a tiny sensor that has a very low range of contrast, which means brighter parts of the image will soon blow out.

Generally, the images the OP posted and liked had enhanced saturation, which can be easily achieved with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop. You can even target the blue and only enhance the blue. Also the color temperature in the OP's images is freezing cold, which is why it kills all color. Typical result of a bad automatic white balance function.

Also, the "liked by OP" shots were taken in the afternoon, the sun coming from behind or from the side, and the OP seems to prefer shooting into the sun.