When a sunset makes the sky purple and pink, why do photos you take of this with your smartphone always end up in reds and yellows?

Question

I’ve experienced this with half a dozen phones. Even when you try to edit the photo, you can almost never recover the actual colors that were in the sky.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Mostly white balance. The software behind your phone’s camera is designed to make pictures (especially of people) look good. One way it does this is to correct for lighting in a way that imitates the way that our brains work. Without it, a face might look reddish under incandescent light but greenish under fluorescent light.

Unfortunately for this to work really well, you need a large part of the picture to be a recognizable color: a blue sky or an approximately white wall. When you take a picture of a purple sky, your camera assumes that there’s some funny lighting and that you want the color fixed.

You may be able to get around it by manually setting the WB or by by pointing the camera at something neutral colored and holding the shutter button half pressed to keep that setting while you take the picture you want.