Why are my prints suddenly coming out with a yellow tint, and how can I fix it?

If the color on previous pictures was acceptable to you, then the question to be answered is, "What factor(s) changed that led to the different results?" There are several possibilities.

• The environment the pictures were taken in. Different light sources have different temperatures. If you take pictures outdoors, sunlight during mid-day has a bluish tint. Traditional tungsten light bulbs, on the other hand, have a very yellow/orange tint. Most current cameras do fairly well when set to auto white balance, but there are limits to what the camera can do on its own, especially if there are mixed sources of lighting in the scene. A typical scenario might be sunlight from a large window, tungsten bulbs in a lamp, and florescent lighting from overhead fixtures.

• The camera's white balance setting. If your camera is set to auto white balance, it should be able to adapt to most changing lighting conditions. But if the setting is on daylight (that little symbol of the sun), cloudy (the sun plus a cloud in front of part of it), or shade (a house with an area of shade on one side) and you are shooting indoors under tungsten lighting, the pictures you take will have a yellow or even orange cast to them because you are telling the camera the light is a cooler blue color when in fact the light is a warmer yellow/orange color.

• Your photo editing/processing/printing software's settings. The white balance (WB) settings of any software you use to edit or print your photos might be set to the incorrect WB for the conditions the photos where taken under. If you tell the program the picture was taken in the shade when it was actually taken indoors under traditional light bulbs, the results will be yellow or even orange.

• Your printer's cyan ink supply. Cyan is the bluish color of one of the three colors of ink, along with black, that many inkjet printers use. The other colors are yellow and magenta (kind of a reddish pink). If the ink cartridge in your printer is out of cyan or the head is clogged preventing it from reaching the nozzles in the printer, then only the yellow and magenta inks will be printed on the paper. This will give the picture a reddish/orange/yellow tint.

All of these issues combined, along with calibrating your monitor to accurately display these colors, is what is known as color management.