Why do my RAW conversion turn out so smudgy?

JPEG

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Another example, not my shot:

Your second pic only lack contrast. Look at your camera parameter, you surely have some contrast dialed up. A quick shot in Photoshop and everything should be fine.

The corvette pic seems to lack a little sharpen for web display.

WTF is smudgy? I think they look fine.

Have you printed these to REALLY look at them?

Remeber that RAW comes completely unprocessed from the camera, while jpegs have some postprocessing done by the camera, including contrast, saturation, etc.. depending on the settings in your camera. Those settings WON'T affect RAW images, that have no processing applied at all in camera.

What Raw converter, what settings?
Canons DPP will use the camera parameters by default, ACR for example won't..

Photoshop CS2.

Felix, email me your raw file (if you can) and I'll show you a couple tricks.

First two photos are near identical, like Raphael said just add contrast.

I have to ask, did you change any of your windows settings so that your pictures remain sharp and keep the colour? Or is everything default, including PS and DPP?