In the Auto mode, your camera will automatically choose the appropriate mode out of eight different types of scene settings for different shooting conditions and situations.
	The Advanced mode takes two shots instead, one with standard automatic settings and the other with optimized settings. With this feature, the camera is able to spot potential problems like poor lighting, backlight or if there are human faces within the shot.

Here’s how you can use the eight different scene settings:

Backlight When taking a shot of a subject with back facing strong lighting, the camera’s Backlight Setting (for objects) will kick in to produce natural looking results, thanks to Dynamic Range Optimization (DRO) technology. If without Intelligent Scene Recognition, automatic flash would be used, causing your subject to appear too dark.

Backlight & Portraits The Backlight Portrait mode (for human faces) enables natural lighting without flash on your subject’s face in backlit scenarios. The usual Automatic flash would have caused your subject’s face to appear much brighter.

Twilight & Portraits For night shots, it’s common for us to snap away using automatic flash. This actually makes faces too bright and backgrounds very dark. With the Twilight Portrait mode, the high-sensitivity shooting will result in both foreground (your subject’s face) as well as the background to have balance lighting.

Landscape A landscape shot looks its best with balanced lighting, so that you enjoy the splendor of the entire picture. The Landscape mode gives you the right exposure for an evenly-lit background so that your landscape picture looks bright and vibrant.

Macro With the Macro mode, you can capture every minute detail of subjects up close, thanks to the powerful focus. Without it, your close-up picture will turn out blurry and details may not be seen.

Portrait The most vital point of portrait shots is to ensure your subject’s face looks fresh and natural looking. With the Portrait mode, the camera will automatically optimises the focus, exposure and skin tone to achieve that to result in a great shot.

Twilight Using automatic flash for out of range subjects in the night will still cause the subjects to appear too dark, but with the Twilight mode’s high-sensitivity shooting, the subjects will appear brightly lit and the atmospheric lighting rightly captured as well.

Twilight with Tripod The last mode- Twilight Tripod mode- is able to capture the “atmosphere” of twilight scenes that cannot be achieved using automatic flash, and has added stabilizer to combat shakiness when the shot is taken.

Click here for more information on Sony’s extensive range of Cyber-shot cameras and decide which one suits your usage the best.