Camera saves image poorly

[Soggy]

I was up in the mountains with a bunch of friends at night and noticed that I could very faintly see the northern lights. So I set my camera for a 16 second exposure and took the picture. While its saving the picture the camera shows me the image in its raw form and it looks excelent, then when it finishes it shows me the image as it now looks in its saved form and its crap, it looks like it loses most of its exposure. I thought it was because I was saving it as a HQ JPG so I set it to save as TIFF which is the highest quality that my camera can do and it still did the same thing.

Does anyone know why it is doing this because its ticking me off bad.

here is a link the the image. that site also has all the info about the settings.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40411917/

 

[Cuervo79]

well what I think is that you're camera as you said is changing the settings when saving, is there a way to save it in raw, so you're camera does not do any modifications on the file? another thing, 16 sec is a bit low, did you try more time? maybe 30 or bulb it... although I can't really remember what's the max of time for star exposures before the rotation of the earth affects the pic creating trails

 

[PlasticSpanner]

Nice shot of the Plough too! :thumbup:

It looks like a lot of digital noise. What ISO were you shooting at? Normally when shooting stars with film I use 200 or sometimes 400 iso otherwise I loose a lot of the clarity and sharpness.

 

[tempra]

Could it be because you have the LCD screen on bright, rather than medium? The LCD won't necessarily show you the real exposure of the image, best to check the histogram - plus when you're looking at it in the dark, it will appear bright.

Try lots of different settings, I doubt that it's your camera at fault, more like trusting the LCD screen that is the fault - I know, I've done it!

 

[xfloggingkylex]

^^^^ that would be my guess. I've set my LCD brightness down just a tad so it looks more the way it shows up on my screen. Have you tried using PS (or GIMP) and do a levels/curves adjustment to see if you can get the exposure back?