Extreme white balance

I encountered a situation yesterday evening where I was photographing in a snowstorm at dusk. I did not realize this at the time, but the light was so filtered that the camera registered basically purely blue, while our eyes saw everything as just grey even with some orange tinting. This is what the camera thought a scene should look like:



Completely blue indeed. It thought the white balance was basically similar to daylight. If you do "auto white balance" in Lightroom, this is what it looks like:



Lightroom chose 2850K, which is completely wrong. You would think that with all these clouds perhaps shade is correct:



Much better indeed but still way too blue. To get neutral color, I had to dial the white balance to 11:



Basically at the limit of what Lightroom allows, and this is the result.



Very close to what it looked like. It turns out that you can encounter natural conditions where you have to max out Lightroom's slider to get correct color. I even had some photos shot there that maxed out the slider!

For some more photos of this place, see my flickr set on this place.