If IIRC, whenever I open my Canon file on Lightroom, the WB sliders are set to a certain values. And I always thought that it might be the indication of the preset WB setting for the file, but given that nothing "baked" in to the raw file, I am free to adjust them. The reason why I developed this understanding was because many event shooters said that if you had time, it's best to tune the right WB so that you can save yourself a bit of time in post processing because the file already got the correct WB.

But you are explaining it is other way round, meaning that no WB settings at all are recorded in the RAW file. It is Lightroom/Picasa/Aperture that "Auto" determine the WB when I first opened it untouched.

Oh, it seemed that I'm getting more photography tip in Maemo.org than Photography site. Hahahaha

EDIT: I just fired up Lightroom (after getting home from work) to view the DNG and you're certainly right. The file certainly looked very "RAW" when untounched. In fact, I tried to retouch it to look like the output produced by Picasa by "only" adjusting the Temperature and Tint but failed to do so. In fact, now that I think back about the scene, the colours produced by Picasa is NOT same as what I saw. So I concluded that Picasa does some degree of processing when opening the file, which explained the difference between the DNG file and JPEG.

Untouched in Lightroom


Retouched in Lightroom adjusted according to actual scene how I remembered it.


Out Topic: Just curious, I checked and view the Raw file produced by Canon in Picasa and Lightroom. They both produced quite idenditical results and looked normal(no funny alien green look). Confusing myself now. Perhaps, both softwares supports Canon's propiertary format so it renders closely how Canon would render its JPEG when we first open the files?