[weatherwise2]

I am having trouble adjusting my white balance and get some subtle tone or hue effects. I have started to do in lightroom and have tried the eyedropper or the temperature slide but never seems to be able to get a correct setting. I have the camera set to automatically set the WB.

Here are a couple of examples in both directions.
1. Taken after storm pointing toward sky


2. Taken at about 30 min after sunrise at beach.

[clarenceclose]

Your white balance does not seem that far off on the second shot, judging from the snow.

On the first shot you might want to set your white balance for cloudy day or daylight. I have found the AWB does not always read the conditions correctly. If you have access to curves adjustment layer click on the snow with the white eye dropper tool at the bottom of the curves popup box and it should push the correction in the right direction.

[Gooshin]

I have started to do in lightroom and have tried the eyedropper or the temperature slide but never seems to be able to get a correct setting.

there is no such thing as a correct setting, there is what you think is the right colour brightness combination, and so forth.

[Lowell Goudge]

I have a "standard" answer for all those who have a K10D. I am not sure what you are using as I do not see any equipment in your signature.

On the K10D it has a great interactive feature.

take a shot, and press the Fn button. using the 4 directional controller select WB.

you will see the adjustment for WB and all the options. Adjust this until you get the desired effect you want. It will not change your last shot but all others will give you the result you selected.

Note that I generally don't do this unless there is extreme color cast either from incadescent lights, flourescent lights, dark overcast or color distortion from green foliage. My usual approach is to set the WB to daylight.

In post processing, I use PSP X2 and correct WB using the Adjust --->Color Balance menu selection, and pick the portion of the image I want represented as white.

it made a little change to your second shot but a big change to your first. Note also that some times this can really make the images cold, and I usually drop the color temperature a little if this adjustment is too extreme.

[procyon]

Second shot has absolutely perfect WB. Check yourself the snow pixel values.
First shot is a bit blueish, but I personally even like it that way.

[axl]

I also think that second shot has godd WB. And I generaly like it. With first one, you could do bit more...

[weatherwise2]

Thanks for the advice. In the first I selected the snow for the white balance but did get the blueish tint. I'll try adjusting using the sliding scale towards the warmer colors and pay attention to the snow on the ground. In the second I did pay attention to the snow on the ground and thought the overall color was too warm but it was near sunrise and there was the "golden color" coming trought the clouds so it is likely close.

Thanks again for the comments.

[AVANT]

I have the camera set to automatically set the WB.

Thanks for the advice. In the first I selected the snow for the white balance but did get the blueish tint.

So was the shot a manually adjusted white balance? Or was it on automatic white balance?

Your scene in the first picture is also underexposed, mixing the underexposed grey into that picture makes it appear even more blue than it should.

[Peter Zack]

Under exposure as Avant says will alter WB in many shots. In the 2 examples I below the original image (shot in RAW) was underexposed on purpose by 3 stops to bring out the colour of the sky. I metered off the middle area of the sky and used M mode to adjust the underexposure.
So afterwards I then open the shot in Pentax Photo Lab. Simply hit Greypoint WB and click on any white section of the photo (or what should be white). You can see the results below and no other adjustments were made to these samples.

If you are shooting Jpeg, I'm not sure how accurate the adjustment is. RAW works much better and I haven't shot Jpeg in months. This is one of the huge advantages of WB adjusting in RAW.

There is another method I've tried with Jpegs though. If you are running Vista, it comes with Microsoft Digital editor. The program works fairly well for what it can do (love the straightening tool). There is a colour correction 'eyedropper' there that does a good job of adjusting a Jpeg to the correct WB .

(BTW these are not the same as the shot I posted earlier as the exposure settings were different and the colours were even better as the light dimmed more)

[weatherwise2]

Thanks for tha advice. I was away and catching up. I will try the photoshop technique as well.