My experience with the lighting in FSW is very "washed out".  Is there a work around?

Yes there is, unfortunatelly they have a small very specialized team and things take time. Stephen Hood is planning to implement really nice things, including the lighting system, if they deliver everything, they will have a really great sim. 

Right now their focus is deliver the SDK before the end of the year. After that we may see some more updates in the visuals hopefully.

FSW still hasn't had its weather system finalised; trueSKY is intended to function dynamically on the release version, enabling real-world weather updating, and since trueSKY will affect how the lighting works overall, since it is part of the 3D environment, I should think DTG are probably not going to waste any time tweaking the lighting until it is worth the effort of doing so with a finished atmosphere, and as noted, that ain't finished yet.

You can sort of see the difficulty with that yourself too: It's interesting to play about with FSW whilst it is in its development process, but as with any early access software, you're not using a finished product, which means if you did tweak the lighting yourself, there's every chance it would be a wasted effort to do so if a new update came out a few days later, so you can see why DTG wouldn't bother doing tweaks of that nature either when they have other things which need sorting out first.

7 minutes ago, Chock said:

FSW still hasn't had its weather system finalised; trueSKY is intended to function dynamically on the release version, enabling real-world weather updating, and since trueSKY will affect how the lighting works overall, since it is part of the 3D environment, I should think DTG are probably not going to waste any time tweaking the lighting until it is worth the effort of doing so with a finished atmosphere, and as noted, that ain't finished yet.

You can sort of see the difficulty with that yourself too: It's interesting to play about with FSW whilst it is in its development process, but as with any early access software, you're not using a finished product, which means if you did tweak the lighting yourself, there's every chance it would be a wasted effort to do so if a new update came out a few days later, so you can see why DTG wouldn't bother doing tweaks of that nature either when they have other things which need sorting out first.

Another addition that will change a lot the lighting in general is the shadowing (clouds, autogen etc). Right now, even if you set a major thunderstorm in the settings, you will see the terrain looking too bright. 

I would say we have to lighting systems acting in FSW, one that looks very impressive (Sky and Airplanes), and another for the terrain that looks odd. I think the PBR 2.0 for the terrain may change that. As Stephen Hood always says, they want that "WOW" effect when they implement new features, I think when they start "fixing" the ground, we will see real improvements in all aspects (Low LOD, ungly autogen, blurry textures, odd lighting etc). 

Unfortunelly it must take more time than we would want.