I shoot Raw! I'll often leave my camera set to AWB and if the light is known to me, to say Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Flash, Fluorescent. But for Raw I don't really have to set it to anything special because I can change them to any WB I want with ACR with either one click or one slide. For mixed light for sure I'll leave to AWB because I'll have to work on the color balance in full photoshop anyway. But the WB with RAW does not matter, only the initial thumbnail that comes up shows how a JPG might have looked.

If you upgrade from a Nikon (DX) D300 to a Nikon (FX) D810, D750, D610, or Df, I am sure you will see an improvement but possibly no difference in color other than less noise. If you want to see a taste difference in WB like Kodachrome vs Ektachrome would would likely have to change to a different brand of camera, say Canon, Pentax, or Sony. I know from looking at my friends cameras that both Nikon and Canon images have a certain "look", that differs. And that is not to say that you can't make them indistinguishable with PP, just that the JPGs right out of the camera look rather different to me and different from my Pentax images. Again, RAWs are pretty independent from camera.

Nothing wrong with setting WB manually or using AWB, but you should not have any problem getting good WB if you use your camera to its optimum for the given light conditions. I find in complex or mixed color balanced light (more than one type of Kelvin) that AWB is a good place to start. But that is me with Pentax cameras.

I use both file formats.

As a note, this was not posed as a JPEG vs. raw question. I would respectfully ask that this thread please not be redirected that way. The question here is really not about file formats; it is a photography question. It's about capturing the best possible negative for subsequent use, whether via post processing or not.

In my mind, exposing with an improper white balance setting is the same as shooting with the wrong film, like using film balanced for tungsten outdoors. Yes it can be corrected in processing and printing, but why do something that just has to be fixed later if it can be correct to start with. And shooting with proper white balance is the only way to capture "all" of the visual information. I'll try to dig back and find an image that I shot years ago at a local zoo of a nocturnal animal display under red light. The image shot with WB at 2500 K with my D200 was easily rendered to a very pleasing natural image with just a little tuning. One shot for comparison at "Incandescent," (about 3200 K) was not ever fully salvageable, even with lots of work. The information at the other end of the spectrum (blue and violet) just wasn't there...it was below the dynamic range of the processor because of the red light.

Thanks, and I look forward to further replies.

I'm running into a curious situation with LR. My CC version is up to date. With my Sony A6500, when I shoot JPEG, I only have one option available for lens profiles; Sony DT 18 - 200 (I only have the 16-50mm and 50-210mm). However, when I shoot ARW (raw) I have Sony E option available with dozens of lenses. Is it that LR cannot apply the full array of Sony E lens profiles to JPEG images? I'm not here to debate the value of RAW vs. JPEG. Much of my photography is work-related where hi-res JPEG works just fine for my needs with less processing overhead. Still, I would like to be able to use the correct lens profiles in LR with either format.