Colorcast is HUGELY dependent on personal taste. I regularly alter mine ....... I'm not a fan of chartreuse or orange, so I seek to ameliorate them. NIK's Color Efex Pro has a [Remove Colorcast] preset which I use most often. In your example, I actually prefer the original. To my eye (and it's a personal preference rather than a proclamation of what is right and what is wrong), the second image looks somewhat "washed out". I've seen a lot of dogs (and take lots of pictures at dog shows), and the original looks closer to what I've seen in the animals.

One thing I do notice, however, is that dogs often reflect the colors of their surroundings. It may be in the future that you would consider changing the background colors while leaving your main subject stand on its own.

In PS Elements you can find it under Enhance/Adjust Color/Remove Color Cast... and it brings up the attached dialog. Capture One and Photoshop have similar features. It's a good starting point toward normalizing an image's colors but it has some flaws.

Picking a spot that "should be either gray, white or black" can be tricky. For example, in Fred Harwood's turtle image, the only spots that might fit that definition would be the gray log to the right or the one under the turtle because they are facing away from the green background and apparently in full sunlight. Removing any color cast hardly made a difference.

And in R.G.'s image, the beauty of the image is that there is a color cast in the sky. Removing the color cast ruins it.

This is why I seldom remove a color cast at all. I just shoot using Daylight color balance from blue hour in the morning to blue hour in the evening, rain or shine. It captures the natural color of the light, just like transparency film does. This way my starting point for raw development does not get off on the wrong foot because the JPEG is not biased.

There are some exceptions such as images under a heavy green canopy or lit by artificial light. Incandescent light is continuous and warm but neon and sodium vapor light have a sharp spike in their spectrum that make color correction difficult.

In photoshop, I use an adjustment layer. My procedure is:
Make a duplicate of the image, apply an average blur to that duplicate image. Then make the initially opened image the active image and keep it active. Though it's not active, make sure some part of the duplicate image is visible on the desktop.
Make three adjustment layers, Black, Gray, White. Though this could be done with one adjustment layer, the three help keep things orderly.
In the Black adjustment layer pick the black point of the image.
In the White adjustment layer pick the white point of the image.
In the Gray adjustment layer just put the cursor anywhere in the duplicate/averaged layer and click.
That does it.

I do the duplicate and layer creations through an action which saves a good deal of time overall.
--Bob

Color Cast

Over some time now, I have been noticing in my processing and other's photos posted here that color cast is an issue. Sure, we set our camera's White Balance to what some believe to be the correct setting. But, that only takes care of something called White Balance, supposedly. What I have noticed is that the scene itself lends a cast to the image depending on the predominant color of the scene we are photographing. In an open area, the blue of the sky may be prominent. In a forest setting, a green cast can be seen. In desert scenes a beige cast is present.

It would seem that this cast affects the vibrant colors we had hoped to capture. It tends to reduce contrast and obscure subtle color variations and details in a photograph. Fixing that issue results in a truer to life image with all of the vivid colors we had intended to capture. So, how do we determine if a photograph is biased toward one color or another? It's pretty simple.

Open a photograph, I use PS so the instructions are for that program. Simply click on Filters, then Blur, then average blur. This effectively averages all of the R, B, and G pixels in the image and produces a single color image. If all is balanced, the result should look gray. Otherwise, the result will appear colored. That color is the cast that is predominant in the photograph.

Although I use this step to determine the WB of photos I process, a good many of you know that I use a somewhat unique WB setting in my camera. So, I'm not going to post any photos I've taken to avoid the diversion from this topic. If some of you would care to let me use your posted photos to illustrate this observation, I'd certainly appreciate it.
--Bob