canon rebel xt

[Fays Place]

merry christmas & happy holidays to all

just received a canon rebel xt    and  when shooting with flash indoors the tone results are to gold - peach toned -- whites are not white.  
   pix of orchids -- they are very blended with background & details in flowers are not good.  Rim of dishes are silver,  
   pix of a oil painting- landscape--  again gold overtones and not really showing colors of the painting -- loss of greens and browns,  whites are more cream,  barn is more washed out and not as vibrant
   pix of 2 roses w/buds--  gold hues over everything -- roses are more pink, background more brown-greenish toned

camers is set on auto, using builtin flash, using a uv filter and a sigma 28-70  "DG" lens,  shot indoors in a home,   focus is not very sharp.

What can I do to help correct these issues?

[Jonathan Wienke]

First of all, your color problem is almost certainly due to mixing light sources of wildly differenf color characteristics. When you do this, there is no white balance setting that will work. If you white balance for the incandescent light, anything lit by flash will have a strong blue tint, and if you white balance for flash, (which is what the camera is doing here) anything lit by the incandescent light will have a yellow/orange tint. You can solve this by putting a color filter over the flash that will match its color to incandescent light. Read this for an explanation of how to do this.

The second issue is probably due to too slow of a shutter speed. But there's no way to tell without seeing an image.