White balance and colour
Colour accuracy is, of course, extremely important to any photographer, and I found that the Alpha 450 performs well in most situations. Its AWB setting results are accurate in overcast, bright sunlight and tungsten lighting conditions. In fact, I discovered that in bright sunlight the camera performs better in AWB than the default daylight white balance setting. Images taken with the daylight white balance look a shade too blue, and the effect becomes far worse should the sun disappear briefly behind a cloud.
Manual and custom white balance settings allow you to use a neutral target to measure the precise white balance yourself. The custom white balance in particular is easy to find in the shooting menu and, once selected, pointing the camera at a white or neutral target and firing the shutter is all that is required to record, measure and set the white balance.
Like all modern DSLRs, the Alpha 450 features a variety of different image colour settings. A favourite setting of mine involved turning up the contrast in the black & white mode as high as it would go to produce dark, brooding images. In fact, this effect was very similar in look to using a red filter when shooting on black & white film.
