Hi Jim
I do lighten images that are a half stop or so and they look great. But images like the jumping pit bull are more than that and when I lighten that much they look awful. I am very picky though! But I would not for instance, put up the an image like this pit bull for sale.

Here is my quick lightening job, I could do a little better than this with a little more time but it would still not be acceptable in my mind. If you look close around his face for instance as well as the handlers skin, you can see that "pink and blue" colored pixel noise and the dog is just artifacty and blotchy.




This image below is the kind of quality I go for, you can see every hair in sharp focus and no noise or blotchiness (the dog was moving quite fast here). This dog is a little closer than the jumping one in the frame but not by a lot.



I shoot at various ISO's depending on the situation. Here, the jumping pit was at 200 (brighter day) and the biting pit at 400. I always shoot high quality jpg, I know I should shoot raw but I typically take several hundred shots at one photo shoot and the jpgs take me 2-3 days or more to process. Raw would take me weeks! And I really don't normally need the raw benefits that much...

For the color casts, I usually get them when lightening a lot with highlight/shadow. The way I describe it is smearing the image with salmon colored butter. This is only when an image is quite dark, not the ones I lighten that aren't as dark.

I'm feeling bad for dragging you guys into this discussion LOL! I appreciate the input and dont mean to be shooting down your suggestions but I have tried just about everything, I know it has to be something simple. I am going to go back to the drawing board and practice shoot aperture priority again and see if I can get a handle on it too, you've both given me food for thought. Maybe it has magically fixed itself since the last time I tried shooting action in aperture priority!