Originally posted by curlednoodles How does Auto mode affect the colours?
When you press the shutter release your camera reads the values of every pixel on its sensor (all digital cameras do this). Your camera then stores those values in one or both of two ways-
RAW - this file format retains the values as seen by the sensor at its designated ISO.
JPEG - in this file format, the computer takes the sensor values and adjusts them according to the current camera settings, and then stores those revised values using a file format that compresses the data.
In short, your camera is a pretty sophisticated computer doing some automated image editing with minimal user input. And when you use AUTO (the green mode on the selection dial), you are telling the camera to use even less user input. You are pretty much limited to a few pre-built editing programs as setup by Pentax engineers.
For general photography, these pre-built programs are actually fairly decent. But move into an image that falls outside what the camera is programmed to handle, image quality can get blah pretty fast. From my perspective there is nothing wrong with using AUTO so long as you recognize and understand where the limitations lie. And the artists participating in this Forum will frequently tell you that most extraordinary images fall outside AUTO's limitations.
For everyone who complains in this Forum that their older point & shot camera took pictures just as good as their expensive dSLR, they are probably correct. And the reason they are correct is in the preceding paragraph.