I totally depends on your goals and your workflow and also on what you shoot.
If you are happy with AWB (and I am often, too), then use it. Like I said: set it to your liking.
I’m not the one trying to convince people to match the WB setting with the monitor color temperature…
Every black smith can tell you when they heaten a piece of iron it gets first red and then going direction white. There’s a saying in Dutch saying :“he is getting red” when somebody gets angry or : “he’s white hot” when he’s very angry.
I think we’re on the same line.
George
Don’t make it a puzzle. There’re now 111 post in this thread.
But what is your conclusion?
George
A last one about awb.
I think I get the best result with awb. However there might be a situation where you should use a preset wb, by example when shooting paintings.
The use of shootin a gray card is also a way to gain a correct wb.
I made a construction on my lens to digitize my dia’s. I’m shooting against a led lamp and a white acryl between it. I use a preset of that light source.
George
Of course there is a color shift, since the “as shot” value is 5861K. If you change the WB the color shifts.
To say it once very clear: This is nonsense. The reference from Eizo explains that if you shoot an image of a monitor screen with a color temperature of 6500K and you set your camera to 6500K the resulting image will show the white correctly:
Since the photo was shot with the color temperature of the digital camera set to 6500 K, white in the 6500 K image in the center appears pure white.
Nice experiment, but we usually don’t shoot pictures of monitor screens. The experiment shows: If you set the color temperature for the captured image to match the color temperature of the light source (the screen in this case), white appears as white. Yes, this is why we do this in the first place.
But if your light source is not 6500K all of this is just not true. Just go on shooting in tungsten light with your WB set to 6500K. If you like the result everything is fine, but white in the scene won’t appear as white on your screen. It is similar to the method to always set the camera to daylight or 5500K or anything to get a better impression of the “mood” of the scene. But it is not more correct than to always shoot at 3500K and claiming the blue pictures in daylight to reflect the correct “mood”.
In the desert picture you have some sunlight, probably very yellow (low color temperature) because it is shortly before sunset. And you have still blue sky, with a higher color temperature. So what is correct? In the shadows? In the lit areas? There is no answer. It is up to the person who shot the picture to decide how it should look like.
Absolutely!
In film photography, transparency film only normally comes in a couple of colour temperatures: daylight and tungsten.
In order to get an acceptable colour rendition on such film, you need to place correction filters in front of the lens. These come in different intensities of two colours: 80 & 82, which are bluish and 81 & 85 which are a brownish colour.
If you measure the light falling on a subject with a colour meter and end up with a number higher than that of your film, that will be a high colour temperature but we would say that it gives a cool coloration without any filtration. So you would apply a “warm-up” filter from the 81 or 85 range.
In other words, the numbers used for colour temperature are the inverse of what we would normally think of for heat temperature.
With film, shooting in tungsten lighting (3200°K), I would use a (cooling) blue filter to bring the temperature of light falling on the film up to 5600°K (don’t be confused by the terminology)
With digital, shooting in tungsten lighting (3200°K), I would dial in that temperature to get a daylight colour rendition (5600°K).
And this is where the confusion of terminology comes from.
With film, making an image warmer involves warming up the light falling on the film with warming filters.
With digital, the temperature of the light falling on the sensor does not get recorded - it has to be imposed, after the fact, by either the camera’s software or an external editor.
If I record an image on a digital camera, in daylight, with a WB of 3200°K, it will come out looking very cool - just as it would if I had taken the shot on tungsten film (3200°K) with an 80A (blue) filter in front of the lens.
This is because we are, effectively, moving the “neutral” colour from 5600°K to 3200°K and all other temperatures then become relative to that new “norm”. To get back to a neutral rendition (5600°K), with the camera at 3200°K, I would need to “warm up” the image by applying a higher temperature in the editing software.
In essence, with the language that we are using, you cannot use the analogy of physical heat temperatures to explain light temperatures; the two are opposite to each other. It’s a bit like trying to write English (left to right) in an Arabic script (right to left) 
Or does that make it even more confusing? 
But as you have said @Calle, try to forget all the technical stuff and do what pleases you.
To be more practical.
Say i have in the afternoon a fill in flash, so i have two light temperatures.
Flash and afternoon naturallight.
I think the camera will set WB on “Flash”.
In this multi lightsource image a more delicate WB control can be helpfull to balance the hars flashlight and the softer, warmer afternoon light.
So would a multi lightsource slider to blend both to a point of “one” WB number be usefull?
Same as shadows , see the desertimage, has colorshifts in the shadows, mostly blueisch cast.
Would it be good to have a dedicated correction slider for WB in shadow level?
Because in practise a colorcast and partialcolorcast are often the reason to change WB. ( like that blue ship in a canal earlier due the blue light it catches in dusk.)
And of coarse “mood” of the day.
…and I’d add to do it in whatever way brings you there.
This is an age old problem that has long stretched the ingenuity of photographers.
Not to do with flash, but in the days of tungsten movie lighting, filming indoors, they would stretch a gigantic sheet of warm-up filter over the windows to get the colour rendition of the outside to match that of the inside!
Once again, I would bring you back to my old chestnut of setting the WB to daylight (5600°K), which is lower than flash but possibly a little higher than the rest of the scene.
Then you can use local adjustments to change the temperature either way on either the flash-lit subject or the rest.
This thread shows how difficult it is to have a genuin , common, point of view.
And because as i wrote, no calibrated room and screen means all is floating around in all variables i have. So i return to practical settings to make my editwork easier.
Your daylight setting of 5500 k i did in camera and as soon as i can i use it to see if it makes my editing easier.
When i have the time i try to create a “example” and see if it’s doable in global WB.
Smartlighting does mostly luminance so maybe Smart WB can be build too.
Somehow i find the present choices in the WB of DxO tool a bit “simple”, rudimentair.
And then you start wondering if this problem can be tackled before in camera that is.
Because this thread started as i can’t get it as i like it. Which is the main reason to change WB and color saturation, vibrance, luminance/value.
G’day and Guten Morgen from Germany,
This thread has really exploded and I am very thankful for all your well researched and detailed answers.
Now White Balance aside, which was a problem specific to those pictures I submitted. (and probably lots of others but not all). I will work on choosing the correct WB in the future. To save my honor i just wanna say the desert shot was shot from the back of a dromedary. So I had to focus on snapping the picture at the right moment while not falling into the dunes 
Greg found the solution to my problem. I recalibrated my monitor and what do you know, not enough red, too much green. I fixed that. He also suggested I should use color rendering and set it to neutral tonality and neutral color.
Those to fixes worked on a profile pic I did using a flash and on my desert as well as my market shot which I uploaded. I consider my problem fixed and thank you all again for your time, interest and friendly reviews. I am glad I joined this forum and I will try to help others where I might know the answer 
With kind regards
Florian
And thank you for submitting a subject that has prompted so much discussion. It is obvious that there are lots of people who get confused on this topic. Instead of just leaving the camera on auto and hoping things work, I hope it has been useful to try and get to the bottom of why things work as they do.
These kinds of discussions are, to my mind, what forums like this are all about - trying to help each other understand a very complex bit of software and how to get the best out of it 
This is where we disagree.
Color temperature is used to correct the raw data to a neutral temperature, let’s say 5600K. Let’s say neutral daylight is 5600K and you shoot manual with 3200K the converter will correct that to much resulting in a blueish picture.
3200K is “emotional warm”, more red in it compared to neutral. 5600K is neutral, white is white. If I shoot a white card in neutral light it will give me a white picture when using awb or 5600K. But if I convert it as 3200K the converter will try to eliminate that to much red and the result will be blueish.
George
Was it you that wrote " if you set WB manual to 3200K and i shoot a rawfile in daylight, 5600K, it also stores the AWB 5600K besides the MWB?"(can’t find the text above)
So the meatering never is “off”?
Is that because of the use of Auto exposure? The lightmeateringsystem and WBmeateringsystem are the same unit?
If you mean me it can’t be me. I don’t know what is meant with MWB.
George
ps
Probably manual white balance.
The ‘practical’ solution to this problem would be to add a ‘warming’ filter to your flash, so that most/all of the light in the scene is the same color temperature.
It wasn’t me, but I think I can answer: This is most likely camera/vendor specific but on Canon you can find a lot of color information using exiftool. E. g. I have a picture where I dialed in a wrong white balance manually and my pictures in daylight came out blue. This is from the exiftool output of one of these pictures:
Color Temp As Shot : 3115
Color Temp Auto : 5878
Color Temp Measured : 5878
If I put 5878K in PhotoLab the image looks about right. So yes, my camera seems to always take note of the “measured” (I’d rather say guessed) value.
If I shoot with Auto White Balance the three values are identical.
I don’t think this is in any way related to exposure measurement. I don’t know for sure but I bet the auto white balance is calculated based on the captured image data. In older Canon models the AF sensor was not color sensitive, neither is the exposure sensor color sensitive. So only after the image has been taken the camera can calculate a value for the white balance.
Edit: In mirrorless cameras the WB needs to be calculated for the viewfinder image as well, similar to live view. But then again this only works with the image sensor of the camera, no other sensor is involved in this case.
Edit 2: This was all written before by @platypus. This thread has become far too long.
nope: found it:
something else small experiment :
in plv4 no correction viewed)
)Now i use colorpicker on all: so white A4 is reflecting my lightbulb temp. and cover temp.
when i make it “white” its about 2500K.
My humble conclusion is:
As @johanna said/wrote: get a feel of which licht was present at the shooting time:
Set WB 5400-5600K fixed and the image will show which light there was:
cold look? light was warmer then. Warmer yellow look? light was higher K then 5500K.
If you want a probably good gues which light there was use AWB.
And warm up or cooldown from that point.
For the sake of experiment i will keep my wb set at 5500K. and do some outdoor shooting when i can. But i probably end up AWb most of the time and experiment on sunsets in Manual WB to see if it helps me there.
Hi yes and yes.
But in the end we maybe learn something.
i did.
