White balance is easily corrected when shooting in RAW. So, if you don't know the exact color temperature of the lighting you are shooting under the camera WB presets have limited value when shooting in RAW. White balance presets are most useful for shooting JPEG when you will not be doing much if any image editing. Tungsten may be 2400 K (K = degrees Kelvin) or it may be 3800 K depending on the light source. Fluorescent lighting has an even wider available color spectrum with most of it on the cool side. The color of ambient light on a semi-cloudy day can vary quite a bit and even moment to moment. The white balance area of digital image control is one of the areas where RAW mode shines.

This photo was taken in my home studio using my 1Ds MK II at ISO 100 and White Lightning studio lights. In camera white balance was set to 4800 Kelvin. My studio lighting system is probably a bit cooler than 4800. I thought it would be useful to see how each RAW converter handled this image when the white balance was set to a known value. Lisa is the sister of a friend of mine. She has very natural looking 'Caucasian' flesh tones.

It is important to remember that these images are presented as constructed from each RAW converter's default settings. These images are not representative of the best image that each RAW converter is capable of producing. All of these images could be improved with a little work in the RAW converter.

Waiting on Bibble 5 release

     SilverFast DC VLT 

Silkypix Developer Studio

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LINKS:
Introduction, comments on RAW and features comparison chart
Adobe ACR & Lightroom) overview
Bibble Pro overview
BreezeBrowser Pro overview
Canon Digital Photo Pro overview
Capture One Pro overview
Silky Pix Developer Studio overview
SilverFast HDR overview
comparison examples - color renditions
comparison examples - color and tonal range
comparison examples - landscapes
comparison examples - artifacts & sharpening
comparison examples - digital noise at ISO 1600
EXIF and IPTC information