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One of the greatest benefits of digital RAW photography is the ability to set the white balance to a wide range of temperatures. No longer are photographers restricted to a couple of temperature settings (daylight and tungsten), and relying on warming or cooling filters to deal with conditions where neither of the two options perfectly fit the light -- such as open shade -- on hand.
Paradoxically, one of the greatest challenges of digital RAW photography is figuring where to properly set the white balance. Because you have so much freedom, it's difficult to find the exact temperature. (The "auto" WB setting on many cameras appears to be just as easily confused as any human, as well.) AS a result, photos can come off of the memory card with what may seem like a close-but-not-quite-right balance. Aside from trial-and-error, is there a way to get it right?
When Adobe first introduced Lightroom and their CS3 version of Photoshop's Camera RAW, they included a new control to complement the standared Saturation level slider. This control, known as Vibrance, essentially applied a saturation boost relative to the level already present in that particular part of the image. Heavily saturated colors will get a relatively minor amount of boost, while more-pastel colors will see much more of a saturation increase. This makes it quite useful for our purposes, since the main issue in white-balance problems is a slight color-cast, most notably in neutral whites and grays. If we can turn that slight cast into a very obvious one, it will become much easier to correct. Enter the Vibrance control!
To begin with, let's take a look at a photo I took last autumn of Seymour Peak Falls. Right off, you can notice a cool cast to the scene -- but that's probably not too surprising considering that it was taken in a forest on a cloudy day. There's going to be some of a bluish tone to the water under those conditions -- but how much is appropriate? If we simply use the white-balance eyedropper tool, depending on where we click, we're probably going to get white water, but an overly warm tone to the rest of the image. However, we can take one other approach. First off, slide the Vibrance all the way to 100.
Now, the slight blue cast has turned anything but slight, not only in the water (which can well have a slightly-bluish tone to parts of it), but also in the large granite slab to the left of the falls (which definitely shouldn't). Now we can use the Temperature slider to get the blue out of areas where it doesn't belong, by moving it to the right, toward the yellow part of the slider. (Obviously, if your image was shown to have a warmish cast, you'd move the slider toward the left, into the blue area.) Once you get the blue-yellow balance right, you may find a mangenta or greenish tone is now present. These, similarly, can be corrected with the Tint slider. Now the image looks more like this.
Far out, man! While the oversaturated colors still give the image a somewhat psychedelic 1960s quality, there's no longer an overall blue cast to the image. While some of the water remains blue, the rocks and foliage (can you say "foliage" about evergreen needles?) now look much more neutral. Now, of course, the next move is to take the Vibrance slider back down to 0, and then, optionally, adjust it to where the colors seem to "pop" to the extent you remember them when at the location.
And here's the end result. The cool cast has been banished, but not at the cost of overwarming the scene. The trees and rocks look dead-on, while the water is neutral in the highlights, while retaining a turquoise tone in the shadows, much as flowing water often does in real life.
Use of this technique has been a real eye-opener for me, If you have photos in your Lightroom collection (or in another management system that allows you to edit with Photoshop) which have stubbornly resisited revealing their actual white balance -- in other words, those you've always felt were just a little bit off -- I strongly recommend giving the technique a try. You may find images that you've set aside due to dissatisfaction suddenly coming back to life.