I am not a beginner, but this seems like an appropriate place for this topic. I have been pretty confused trying to get a good white balance by using a white balance target, either using a white balance dropper tool in processing or setting a manual white balance in camera using a target. It has very consistently given me results that are much warmer than it should.
Actually, it's giving you much warmer (custon) white balance in
outdoor shots, which are likely to be subject to a strong blue color cast from the blue sky. Thus, it's to be expected that in conditions where a general blue color cast is present, applying a white balance correction on a neutral subject such as a colorchecker gray patch, will cause the image colors to shift to the warmer colors.
I've gone out and specifically tested this several times over the years to the same results each time, but here I will present only a few examples of photos I still have easily accessible.
First, I would say that on the rare occasion it does seem to work decently.
Here is a photo I took to test at one point, this one with the white balance adjusted by me so the photo looks accurate to life:
Here is the white balance set using the dropper tool on the target. It is very, very close to what Lightroom's Auto WB comes up with:
This is perhaps slightly off from reality to my eye, but it's okay.
That's because the scenic lighting was not biased toward the blue. It was fairly neutral to begin with.
[snip]
Another attempt during one of my testing efforts:
This is the most egregious example. The others are at least... close in SOME way, maybe they would work for a given style, for instance. Here we just get something completely orange.
Let's take a closer look at the girl and the colorchecker without being biased by our perceptual expectations for what she should look like when photographed outside:
Left=Your uncorrected rendering; Middle=Your custom WB rendering using the colorchecker; Right=my correction to your custom WB rendering
With the scenic context missing, I think that most viewers would consider the Left rendering above to be to cold, the Middle rendering to be to warm and the Right rendering to be about right. Note that the blue circles inside the Middle and Right renderings are from the corresponding positions in the colorchecker of the Left rendering. Since the RGB values for the Middle and Right colorcheckers are very close to neutral, you can clearly see now that the colorchecker in the Left rendering is subject to a relatively blue color cast (as is the girl). In the context of an outdoor shot, the blue color cast is acceptable because we mentally adjust for it and perceive the colorchecker as gray when, objectively, it's far from it. Likewise with the girl's skintone and the perceived color of the shirt. By correcting WB based on the colorchecker, the WB is warmed considerably to achieve the corrected white balance, but we now perceive the girl's skintone, etc. to be too warm. That's just the inherent challenge of white balance and any effort to "correct" it.
What about the difference between the Middle and Right rendering? I checked the file info for your renderings and saw that you applied a quite a bit of positive vibrance and saturation adjustments (in addition to other adjustments to punch up contrast). When you do that, any pre-existing color conditions will be exaggerated toward a warmer color balance. The Right rendering has unwound that exaggeration by an applied negative adjustment of vibrance and saturation to yield a rendering that's presumably closer to what would have been generated in ACR/LR without the push you added in the first place. The lesson here is to be careful with vibrance and especially with saturation if you're dealing with overall color balance problems.
