First let me state that I consider white balance to be an aesthetic/creative tool like any other of the adjustments a photographer can make and I am rarely concerned with great accuracy. Moreover, I find that my personal taste also tends toward the cool side (although I think you have gone too blue for me). However, there is one case in you have to rein in your creative genius and that is in portraits. Human brains are genetically very sensitive to skin tone; it is one of the tools, like body language, that we use to gauge the frame of mind of people we encounter and if the skin color in a portrait is not good, the viewer will sense it immediately. What are good tones? Look at this chart
http://retouchpro.com/pages/colors.html
and you will see that the RGB colors are always in a descending relationship - blue is less than green which is less than red, like 200/170/150. This is not true in your first pair of photos. The blue is too strong.
The easy way to get it right is to shoot RAW. When you use RAW the WB is not set in the camera at all, you set it later in your computer. When you shoot a jpg you are guessing what the WB will be, other than making a custom WB you have no creative control. True, you can adjust the color of the jpg afterwards in your computer, but that means doing it twice which causes a loss of quality. When you do it once in the RAW converter you are free to try all sorts of settings until you find the right one. If your monitor is calibrated you can judge it visually, but even if it is not the converter will give you a numeric readout, so you can do it "by the numbers".
One more point, in your first photos the red channel is blown. If you had shot RAW you would have had more exposure headroom and (since the blown channel is very likely caused by the WB and not present in the RAW data) the blown highlight could have been prevented or recovered.
; I was just wondering how you determined that the red was blown out. After reading your latest post I see how to do it.
