Have you noticed that sometimes your images have a funny colour cast over them? Was this something that was not present at the time you took your shot?

If so, then you need to think of colour balance (often known as white balance).

It sounds technical, and it can be very complex, but basically, each scene you shoot has colour characteristics depending on how it is lit.

In this way, morning and evening sunlit scenes will be lit by orange light, midday scenes by bluish light and flash scenes by high intensity flash light. If the weather is overcast or you are shooting by light indoors, then the ambient light will change accordingly.

This means that the camera is presented with different "ambient" light which it can see but the human eye can't (the brain compensates to think of the scene as a uniform one in all lit conditions).

What does this mean for you and your camera?

Many cameras have an "automatic white balance" (AWB) setting. This is fine as far as it goes and it will detect the overall colour of the scene and automatically compensate. Thus, with flash, the camera detects, via AWB, the flashlight and averages out the colour rendition to an "average" acceptable to the human eye.

The trouble is, the average may not be suitable.

Consider a sunset. The sky is a range of deep oranges, yellows and pinks. Beautiful. You capture this on camera but your AWB setting averages out the "excessively orange" scene to a murky and dull hue. Your photo will look good but not spectacular.

This can happen in all situations where the overall light is "different" to what the camera considers to be "average".

The way around this is first of all to be aware of the issue and secondly, to switch to "manual white balance". On manual you can set the camera for daylight, cloud, flash, indoor light etc. By selecting the correct setting you will get he most pleasing and intense result which will mirror the scene you visualised.

But be careful!! - if you set the wrong custom setting (for example daylight when you should be switching to flash) then you will get an artificial and unattractive colour cast.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com