I am not sure which vintage of the 18-55 you are using, but those are the two lenses that I started out with. My own observations were similar to yours... landscapes that were focused at a distance or infinity tended to be very yellow or warm, and the sky's blues took a particularly hard hit. Colors and detail when zooming in tight were not too bad (at least I could fix it with white balance adjustments). So taking pictures of flowers or frogs did not look to bad, but getting a nice sunset always came out dark and the colors were off. Three things have helped me:

  1. A polarizer helps somewhat... especially when shooting 90 degrees from the sun. The polarizer helps bring out the blues and can provide more contrast in the clouds. It is not something you want to use all the time, but I find I use it more times than not when shooting landscapes.
  2. As everyone has already said, DR is a real issue, and a graduated ND filter helps a lot. Even with cheap filters, this was probably the single biggest thing that helped me tame the DR issues of sunsets/sunrises. If you are tired of silhouettes and would like to be able to see the foreground, then this will help a lot. HDR is helpful, but it I think it works even better (and easier) if you use the Grad ND as well (i.e., if you keep the DR to a minimum with filters, you can reduce the number of shots needed and the noise is reduced in the final image). And I am not suggesting cheap filters... the better you get the better the results.
  3. Glass does matter. The biggest impact of upgrading my lenes was the contrast and color rendition that I got. In particular, I was getting better blues and everything was not sowing up so warm (yellow and orange). You can shoot RAW and adjust for some of this by adjusting the White Balance on post processing, but that will only get you so far. I do not have the best glass, and I look forward to getting better lenses in the future; but I do like the change I have seen with the upgrades so far.


Just my 2 cents, and it is probably worth what you paid for it.