Lack of colour in pictures

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asdf205

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I'm quite new to photography and seem to be having some trouble with my shots. I've got my head around the basics however. My problem is that all my pictures seem to be lacking colour and depth. This is either with manual and auto mode. My camera is a Canon 450d (while I know it's not the best I was expecting a little more from it). Is there anything I can do to improve my shots?
 
A sample picture or two, unedited and with EXIF intact, might help. It could be the picture style settings, the exposure or the light itself. Or maybe it's your monitor calibration or the viewing software you are using. There are far too many variables to be able to comment without seeing what you're seeing.
 
Do you have any examples with exif we can take a look at?
 
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You seem to have chosen scenes without especially strong colour content, and certainly not much of a range of colours.

The first one looks about right to me, maybe 1/3 stop overexposed, no doubt due to the dark subject.

The second one looks a bit overexposed in the foreground and the colour balance seems a bit on the cool side.

I agree neither one looks rich and vibrant, but that's partially down to a little bit of overexposure on both, possibly camera settings that are on the gentle side of lively and scene content which is simply not teaming with colour to begin with. Black cars, grey concrete, dried out earth simply don't have much colour in them.

Unfortunately there is no EXIF data so to so any more would be based on guesswork. How did you have the camera set up with respect to picture style? What was the setting for white balance? What shooting mode were you in? What metering pattern? Any exposure compensation? These answers would be included in the EXIF, but it's not there.

EDIT : I had a quick crack at the second one - tweaked the levels, increased contrast, decreased exposure, warmed it up and increased saturation. It's not quite perfect, but an improvement, I think. These are all things which could have been improved, maybe not 100%, but at least partly, by changing the camera setup.

20120418_163501_000.jpg
 
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Think you may be expecting a bit much with such dull colours to start with. A quick touch of saturation, slight lowering of exposure etc,. in a basic editing tool is all they need.
Or to do similar in camera use a more vivid setting and lower exposure.
 
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