I'm sorry but I have a complaint, or maybe it is just a little whinge. First of all let me explain that I was a Lithographic printer for about 25 years, so I consider that I do have a bit of experience with colour. Quite a good eye for colour actually. A couple of days ago I went fishing off the rocks one evening with a few mates and I snapped off a few pics in sunset mode. When I got home and down loaded the pictures they were quite good, too good actually, the oranges and reds were outstanding on the pc. The sunset was not really that impressive at all. I think I would rather have an real result and when you get the one shot that is a real stunner then you know you have got something special.
I have a few different shots as screen savers on my laptop at work and people have remarked about the beautiful colours of the sunsets, but I feel it is akin to cheating, it wasn't really like that.:nono:
What settings would you guys suggest to capture a real sunset?
For me, I've never liked using any of the color modes, most of the scene modes in any camera come with color tweaking, I believe especially landscape and sunset. Pretty much, the camera just does one simple color overlay on your picture, in some cases this can look gorgeous, like skyguy's case. However, I find this unnecessary as I can do it myself on photoshop with much greater control and choice of colors.
Beside scene modes, you have one other setting that tampers with your color of the sunsets. That's where you change your contrast, saturation, NR, etc. I think Saturation being the worse one.
Anyway, going down to settings for sunset, I recommend using the M mode only. The excess light from the sun makes it very difficult for the light meter as well. On your FZ, you should be using F8. Try not to zoom in, many people will tell you that a max aperture of F2.8 stopped to F8 gives way better results than a F3.6 stopped down to F8, although I have not personally verified this, its true for most dSLR lenses.
ISO 100 too, but even with that, you will get noise in the sky on the FZ (I did last time at least). Interestingly I got noise on mine too with my dSLR at ISO100.. oh wells, the sky makes noise prominent I guess.
So at the end, all you want to control is the shutter, depending on your preference of how bright it should be.
I haven't got a sunset to show but I do have a sunrise, I'm not sure if you call these natural colors (I didn't edit them at least), but I must disclaim that I think its a badly taken picture anyway! I wanted the picture to be somewhat gloomy with that "ray of hope" bursting out of the bottom, but I think having the sun right at the bottom turned out to be bad composure.
