Andrew and Andrew... Thanks for your responses. (My internet has been down for 3 days and I just switched to a new carrier, so please pardon my delay in responding.) I suspect editing for "pleasing results" is probably the most sensible approach. I like my initial WB to be reasonably close, mainly as a point of departure. When editing and staring at the monitor for a while, it's very easy for my eyes to adapt to the displayed image and fool me into thinking my edits look good, when in fact they are not. When coming back to revisit an image after some time away from my computer, problems with color, saturation, brightness and contrast often slap me in the face. Defeating "eye adaptation" has always been my biggest challenge, so getting WB close initially helps. That is what prompted my question. I find that using some sort of reference (white card, gray card, Color Checker, etc) can help, but I also find that forcing those neutral patches to be truly neutral often results in a WB that that seems to disagree somewhat with what "I think" my mind remembers. I suspect our eyes pick a WB that lays somewhere in between AWB that camera suggests and forcing a gray card to be perfectly neutral. So, I was hoping to learn more about how our visual system "white balances" a scene. If I am photographing a portrait in the woods under a canopy a green leaves, a gray card works very well. I want the skin tones to be accurate so the person doesn't look sickly greenish yellow, and the rest of the scene is less critical. But, if the scene is of the woods themselves, I find that a gray card often results in overcompensation. Anyway, thanks for your responses. Color is complicated. Lou