This is especially apparent if you look up into the bright sky and then immediately down to the grown. The ground will be black and then fade back into color. Does this happen for anyone else? Is there a setting or something I can change to fix this?

Thanks.

I have noticed this also, mainly when looking at a bright light then back to a dark area like the wall or something, thought maybe it was trying to make the effect of the players eye's adjusting to the light and dark like in some games, which would be cool if done right but its over kill if this is actually a feature, but im thinking its a bug for sure .

It's called Bloom I believe. It's supposed to imitate pupil dilation due to changing light strength. So in other words, yes, most if not all of us see this in game. As for how to turn it off, I believe there's an ini setting, something like "useBloom". I don't actually know what the variable is, but searching for "bloom" in the ini would probably help you find it easily. Hope that helps.

That's caused by HDR.
It's supposed to be a feature to simulate eye adjustment to light. I find it nauseatic.

Unfortunately there is no working game setting to turn it off. The only known way is to use SLI.
So I'd suggest to wait for a patch.

Ah, HDR. Right. Sorry, I guess my information is off, got the two mixed up again. I do remember seeing a option for bloom, but not one for HDR, as Lord of Light said. Sorry for the mix-up.

It's called HDR and the reasons of this is intentional. Bethesda WANTS it to have these fast lighting changes, from ultra white sky in one second to blue sky in another second.
Bethesda's games have been like this from Oblivion.

I personally find it quite ugly and annoying/distracting. I don't know why Bethesda keeps doing it.

A weather mod that changes the HDR and lighting values can change this. This is not that hard to change to be honest.

The reason why Bethesda keeps adding it is because people keep asking for more realism. In one breath people condemn Bethesda for not having textures being such a high resolution that they appear the same as if you were looking at them under a magnifying glass in real life and in the next breath they condemn them for using HDR to simulate realistic adjustment to light that your eyes do (seriously, try it! Look at a bright light then turn it off, everything will appear really dark for a few seconds until your eyes adjust, the reverse is also true from darkness into light).

Personally I like it, although I wish it could be toned down a bit. I do think it was a bad idea not to include the ability to disable it as plenty of people get motion sickness like symptoms from it.

For me it's more than an annoyance unfortunately. I have perfectly healthy eyes, but the constant lighting adjustments that happen in certain areas of the game (especially with the FXAA injector on, but it happens either way) puts a huge strain on my eyes. It's incredibly unrealistic at it's current setting. It either needs to be completely disabled or toned down.

It's an awesome feature IMO. I love it. It doesn't seem overdone to me at all.

The big problem with HDR is that the effect isn't subtle at all. The fade time between bright and dark is so quick it's distracting. Even adjusting it so that it takes, say, 5 seconds to fade would make a big difference in usability and would be much more natural to boot.

It makes torches and light spells totally irrelevant, yay. It's also about as realistically done as the incremental timescale shadows outside, woohoo. (~set timescale to 1 kinda fixes it though)

Two giant steps darwkcab in my opinion.