White Balance of Sunset

[KeithB]

Bob:
I know you need to lower the exposure to darken the skies when taking a picture of a sunset, but if you are not shooting RAW, should you set the white balance to something other than "Auto", after all, you don't want to shift the reddish light to blue, right?  Or am I misunderstanding something.

[Bob Atkins]

True. You want sunsets to be red, although even on auto while balance they will still be red. "Auto" doesn't really shift things enough to turn a deep red sunset into something bland.

You can test this yourself by shooting a sunset in RAW and then using DPP to apply the various white balance modes and see what the effect of each is.

Auto is usually fine, but you could use daylight, cloudy and shade if you wanted to make the skies even redder. Tungsten would bias the colors most towards blue, but even then the skies would still be red.

While balance is a fairly subtle color correction. If it wasn't then every picture of a fire engine or red car shot in auto mode would come out the wrong color.

[KeithB]

Another thing I can do is shoot a sunset with my WhiBal in the picture and then set the whitepoint with the Whibal.

I would not say that white balance is subtle, just that the camera is pretty conservative.