My mother is doing some painting, and she was talking about different lightning conditions. What was special about something being lit up by a sunset for example. I argued that it should be impossible to tell the difference between sunset lightning and sunrise lightning. I’ve never given this much thought before, so maybe I am mistaken?
I know I’ve heard of movies doing a ‘sunrise over the atlantic’ establishing shot by shooting a sunset over the pacific and time-reversing it, or something like that. Cheaper than actually flying across the continent. (Presumably you could tell the difference by watching the waves REALLY closely. 
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But that sort of thing implies that there’s not much difference in the sky.
Assuming you meant to say ‘lighting’, I could imagine one reason that the effects of the two could be different, when over land: sunsets will happen over land that’s been warmed up, giving different conditions of convection in the athmosphere, possible causing noticeably-different optical effects.
This could result in sunsets being generally more spectacular than sunrises. The thermal currents may life more dust into the upper atmosphere, scattering the sunlight more. However, I don’t generally get up early enough in the morning to test this hypothesis. Even if this is correct the effect might be insignificant compared to the local weather conditions.
If it’s an area near a seacoast, there almost always will be more moisture in the air at sunrise than sunset. Makes the two events look distinctly different.
IMHO, sunrises look different. Of course, the sunrises I’ve seen may be affected by my mood at the time; cold, sleepy, running to get that paper under that door before that professor shows up - so it might not be a real effect, but I think I could tell the difference between a spectacular sunrise and a spectacular sunset.