White balance and colour
The colours in JPEG images produced by the Lumix DMC-FZ200 are very bold, even in the standard colour mode. When set to vivid, I found that the colours, particularly the reds and greens, became an almost a solid mass of colour. Unless a particularly pop-art style is desired, the standard colour mode should be adequate.
Auto white balance works well. The only situation I found that really fooled it was when photographing in dense green woodland. Here, the AWB responded to the large expanse of green foliage by adding lots of purple to neutralise the green. This is a common effect with most digital cameras, so I don’t note it as a particular failure of the FZ200. Switching the camera to the overcast or sunny daylight setting produced a good well-balanced result. And, of course, as the FZ200 is able to shoot raw images, the white balance and colour of these files can be easily tweaked in post-production.
