need some help with settings

[treesprite]

I can't get the colors to come out right in pictures, at least not consistently. I have a little Nikkon Coolpix - wondering if someone can explain to me what settings to use so the colors come out the way they look to the human eye. Thanks.

[Jon Lazar]

Do you have a white balance setting with presets like "cloudy", "flash", "fluorescent" ?

 

You can also correct the color afterwards on your computer, and you can get pretty good results without using Photoshop. I often use the (lame) photo editing software that came with my HP printer to do basic stuff like cropping and color correction.

 

Nikon makes a lot of different CoolPix with widely different capabilities...which do you have?

[treesprite]

It has "white balance" settings like that. I have been messing with different settings, but still can't get the colors coming out looking like they do to my eyes. I don't want to "Photoshop" my pictures, because then the colors are not accurate either. There are settings for "vivid" color and "standard" color, but changing that doesn't seem to make any difference. I don;t know the model number. It's the 10 megapixels one. You'd figure after a year I'd know how to use the thing, but I still don't.

[Jon Lazar]

You'll have to use trial and error to see how close you can get with the presets. Vivid increases the saturation, which doesn't help correct for reef lighting. If you can't get close enough with a preset you'll have to either postprocess the pic with photoshop and adjust the white balance or accept the colors the way they are.