Too Dark...Where Do I Start?

I realize there are a myriad of things I can do to compensate for this, but where to start? The skies were a little bit overcast, yes, but not enough to really make this happen. In fact, many of my pictures are a little dull and gray these days, regardless of the sun. You can check EXIF and see what it tells you. One thing I'll say is that I shot this wide open at f/4, so you could argue that f/4 isn't the sweet spot on my lens in this example, but I've seen the same result from shooting at other apertures and and with other lenses. I'm fairly well-convinced that it's a setting on my camera body or I'm just not using LR3 properly.

The biggest issue is that the blacks are just too black. Even with unprocessed JPGs I see this. In this picture it looks like a freakin' blob of nothingness, a black hole.

Suggestions? Throw 'em out there!

You should be able to (just) see some detail in the darkest part of the bike (tip of the underside rear fender)
I would not say it's "too dark".

If you want to brighten it, lower blacks and/or raise "fill" in ACR / LR, and set the tone curve to "linear" instead of "medium contrast"

Jpeg is a processed image regardless if it just came from the camera or not.

Have you tried tweaking the fill light adjustment in LR?

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Are you shooting with Raw or jpeg? And, what software are you using to process your images?

Your brightest whites seem OK -- in other words you didn't necessarily underexpose the images, so it's just having to deal with the high contrast where the dark areas can benefit from some boosting, as René points out.

^^^
I shoot RAW only. I have played with jpeg for comparison purposes, though. I use LR3 on a PC to process the pix.

I have played with fill, and played with the blacks and shadows. I get a little noise and some contrast loss with the colors when I do this. I do realize I can't have one side and still get the other.

Well, in Lightroom you can get an idea of how much it is possible to push those whites -- hold down the Alt key while pulling the Exposure slider to the right until the whites begin to show clipping alerts. Although, like I said, it looks like they are pretty well exposed.

Racer997 wrote in post #12353521
^^^
I shoot RAW only. I have played with jpeg for comparison purposes, though. I use LR3 on a PC to process the pix.

I have played with fill, and played with the blacks and shadows. I get a little noise and some contrast loss with the colors when I do this. I do realize I can't have one side and still get the other.

Then just continue on down the line.
Next Step would be adjust the brightness and Contrast.
Then Presence adjustments. Vibrance will bring those colors and contrast back that you lost making the other adjustments.

Then move down to the Detail to adjust the noise if necessary.

Get familiar with holding down the Alt key when making adjustments to see where you are actually applying.

You also have the Adjustment Brush that will allow you to make isolated spot corrections. Extremely useful tool!

As indicated above, all jpgs have already been processed in the camera, and some of the lightest and darkest values have been thrown away. Shooting RAW will give you about 0.5-1.0 EV extra exposure range to play with when you process in Lightroom or CS5. In addition, your original image looks slightly underexposed to me. You might want to try setting exposure compensation to +0.5 EV, which would give you some more shadow detail. Using exposure compensation and shooting RAW should give you the greatest range for holding detail in both shadows and highlights.

what about using something as simple as the dodge and burn tool to darken/lighten the areas you want to

Racer997 wrote in post #12353521
I have played with fill, and played with the blacks and shadows. I get a little noise and some contrast loss with the colors when I do this. I do realize I can't have one side and still get the other.

That's not strictly true. Granted, in producing just one image you might have to make compromises, the riders leathers definitely suffer in tkerr's version.

However, if you do two versions in raw conversion, one as you have originally plus a second one processed to bring out the shadow detail (say, done as tkerr did) then blend them in PS, you can have the best of both worlds.

Imagine taking tkerr's image and placing yours over it as a separate layer. Then gradually erase the area under the saddle so that the shadow detail from the layer underneath shows through. That way, your original image remains unaffected apart from the shadow area which has now come from an image processed specifically for it.

sandpiper wrote in post #12353978
That's not strictly true. Granted, in producing just one image you might have to make compromises, the riders leathers definitely suffer in tkerr's version.

However, if you do two versions in raw conversion, one as you have originally plus a second one processed to bring out the shadow detail (say, done as tkerr did) then blend them in PS, you can have the best of both worlds.

Imagine taking tkerr's image and placing yours over it as a separate layer. Then gradually erase the area under the saddle so that the shadow detail from the layer underneath shows through. That way, your original image remains unaffected apart from the shadow area which has now come from an image processed specifically for it.

I only adjusted the Fill light to demonstrate that the detail in the blacks could be brought out..
If I had made any other adjustments such as I recommended in my second reply there would perhaps be a huge difference giving him the best of both worlds.

But if you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty then using layers and masks in Photoshop would be the way to go.