help!

[durham]

so i went to the city last night and took some photos with my 20d and looking at them today the vast majority of photos with extreme highlights such as car lights or fluorescent lights (all exposures were >1 sec)the highlight is blown out with no detail and an almost pixelated rim of colour....
this is really bugging me as when looking at the photos at 100% it's tending to ruin them and. Would this be due to the long exposures and therefore unavoidable under the circumstances or is there something i can do?

i'll post a crop of the what i'm talking about if anyone thinks it might help. cheers guys

[rancho]

pls post image. with long exposures small, bright lights will do a number of things including star shapes etc.

[durham]

hmmm, if i blur the edge of the highlight it looks better but still not impressed with some of them. those crops are at the original resolution. also not impressed with the focus of my photos last night, a lot of them seem to be a bit fuzzy and i was using a tripod, look alright when resized though... ah well

[phunkdust]

shooting in raw or jpg?

if you're shooting jpg you've bumped yourself into the wrong parameters mode, probably something with the contrast turned way up

if you're shooting raw then you've lunched the curves in whatever program you're using

solution is to reset everything to defaults.

[durham]

shooting in raw for the first time...
those crops were done before any post processing was done at all. i've reset the camera settings so hopefully it won't happen again but hmmmm

[rancho]

what aperture were you shooting at? diffraction may be contributing aswell. depending on focal length and distance, perhaps try something like f/8 @ infinity. experiment a little until you get results youre satisfied with.

[phunkdust]

It looks like pretty normal clipping to me.