To start off, I love Skyrim. My only complaint as of now is with the display though. A lot of times, characters faces will be so dark that I cannot distinguish any of their features. The same goes for whatever horse I am riding. Some things are brightly lit, and but others are far to dark to the point of being pitch black. Adjusting brightness within the game can only do so much, and the settings on my TV have minimal effect as well. I think Skyrim really needs to incorporate a "Gamma Correction" feature via a patch under "Start" "Settings" "Display". This would allow all of the colors and features of this glorious world to be realized more efficiently. Please post in this if you agree, I hope it gets the dev's attention.

Came here to post the exact same thing. The game itself looks fine to me though. I have a tv with a pretty decent black level, and while I have the game's brightness all the way up, the game world itself seems pretty spot on. But then things like character models, especially those of redguards and darker horses, come off as pitch black, especially at night. It's pretty bad.

I don't have this problem, but I'm on PC. The lighting is so good I rarely ever need to use a torch even.

Are you perhaps talking about HDR effects?

EDIT:
Here is what my game looks like at night or in the dark.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4198/moonohw.jpg
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/3421/deaddragonc.jpg

If you're on PC you can get the injector mod (google it) and only use the gamma options (will take you a while to edit the config).

Unfortunately I'm playing on PS3 and don't have that option. Help me Bethesda! You're our only hope.

Wow, you have your brightness turned up. I think the OP wants to be able to see everything without it appearing washed out.

To be more specific, my issue is more with daylight lighting than nighttime. I understand the night being dark and torches having a purpose, but during the day time, when everything else seems perfectly lit, my horse or NPCs will be oddly dark, almost black. It creates an inconsistant look when the rest seems so well lit. It's as if the shadow effects are just way to pronounced and don't seem believable, making anything not in the sun far to dark.

yeah nighttime is fine. its daytime when people's faces are half-black if they're not faceing the sun (and even if they are)

My game more or less is about at that of the pics posted above. For some reason, darker character models like to get really, really dark. Literally the only issues I am noticing in the game are the Dremora, Redgueards, and darker colored horses.

Wow, I have none of these issues. My daytime seems bright and my night time seems dark. My only complaint is when everything look grey, but that is due to their choice of art direction during certain times of the day and certain weather patterns.

The 360 has farked up gamma.

...
I just realized that after getting Battlefield 3.
There's something serious going on:
Light is burning like the sun, darkness is like black holes, absorbing light; Both in Battlefield 3 and in Skyrim.

I had to put brightness up to the max to see what's in shadows in daylight in both Battlefield 3 and Skyrim, and I had problems with Black Ops before that.
Problem is, I can hardly tell the difference between night and day, and have to tweak the contrast on my TV lower to avoid burning my eyes out when looking at shining objects.

Microsoft should release a gamma-fix...

Here's an illustrative picture:
[img]http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2642/riverwood01.jpg[/img]
I took a PC screenshot and changed 3 areas with the following effects:
I turned "off" the gamma for 12,5% of the darkest areas and turned gamma to max on 12,5% of the brightest areas.

That is 25% of the light and darkness-information lost right there, and it actually looks like on the 360!
...

Notice how the flowers are shining. How the shadows are pitch black, and how the armor of the main character loses it's texture to darkness.
Resulting in the effects we see on the 360 with gleaming lights from any metal object or lit area and pitch black shadows from objects casting shadows from candelights and sunlight alike.

They probably gamma-corrected the 360 because the colors on most games were so brown and gray that they needed to drop information (polarizing light and darkness = less information) to let games to look better.

On first sight, they do.
But on a second glance, and deep inside my subconcious mind, I notice that there's information missing, and nothing actually added, by the gamma correction...
Which causes me to want to change the gamma, because the graphics are wrong, somehow.

Problem is, the only way to change the gamma would be on the TV, and what can the TV do when the input signal for the top and bottom 12,5% colors look the same because the input is the same?
Lost information is lost, and cannot be restored without the raw data.
Only the source causing the loss can be addressed; Increasing lighting causes even more information loss and worse graphics, because increasing brightness causes even more light.
In turn, reducing contrast to reduce the difference between light and darkness reduces the colors inbetween the extreme light and darkness even MORE.

Tweaking advanced features like adding background lighting on my TV, reducing contrast on the TV WHILE increasing the color depth and lowering the black level (making black lighter; less black) on the 360's HDMI channel made the game look like on PC, with the exception of night and day looking almost the same except for the color of the sky.

The problem with glare would probably be non-existent on LED-TVs.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Although, the issue is not solely home to or caused by the Xbox. It is more dependent on the game that is being played.