Atmospheric Changes with White Balance

There are many settings and alterations which may be performed on photographs to render your vision. One of the ways to alter the atmosphere and feeling of a particular photograph is to adjust the white balance. It's quite a simple adjustment, many post-processing software packages such as Lightroom or Photoshop allow you to do this with a slider: pull one way for more blue; the other for more red. The "temperature" value, is taken from the temperature of lights that usually give off those colours and represented in Kelvin: K. While technically important, I usually operate by how the image looks, how it feels; rather than the strict temperature value in the software.

This image was shot in RAW with automatic white balance set by the camera:

And it is quite faithful to what my eyes saw. The interior of the building has more flourecent lights and a blueish tinge, while the lights set in the sidewalk have a warm yellow/orange colour. The temperature value was (4000K).

Setting the temperature warmer to 4857K yields a much warmer and inviting scene:

It could very well be a warm summer night rather than the 8℃ or so that it was in reality!

However, the glass and steel structure felt more cyberpunkish than nostalgic to me so I set the temperature to a cooler 3071K:

The cooler temperature evokes a sci-fi atmosphere, clean chrome-steel and antiseptic surfaces.
I haven't tried to add extravagant lens flares like the more recent Star Trek movies, I think that would be pushing reality a bit too far!

In closing, always experiment with your photographs!
The digital darkroom makes this easy and fun, though the myriad settings can be a bit overwhelming at times.
White balance can be used to change the atmosphere of a photograph, or to render overly orange (low light conditions often trick the auto white balance settings in cameras) or green people or walls (flourecent office lights) back to their natural colours.

Good luck and have fun making the photographs that you want to make!