I have an older Canon A95, but I believe it has many of the same features and modes. Try setting the white balance to "sunny" and also you may want to set the Exposure Compensation to a negative value to allow less light into the camera which would help with overexposed pics (you'll have to play with this one since the EC can go from 0 to -2 in 1/3 increments).
Keep in mind that most digital pics require a fair amount of post processing to get the perfect balance of contrast, sharpness, saturation, etc...