Selective White Balance Adjustment in an Image

I can think of two reasons why you might not be seeing Kelvin.

Rob_Cullen already covered one reason: If it isn’t a raw file, you don’t get an absolute Kelvin scale but a relative -100 to +100 scale.

But that doesn’t explain why you might see Kelvin for the first adjustment but not for a later one. For that, I have to ask if you are creating masks. That’s because masks don’t use Kelvin for white balance, they are relative to the white balance set for the entire image. So you can set a raw image to 6500K, and then you create any mask, then the Temperature value range for that mask will be -100 to +100. Could that explain what you are seeing?

One thing is for sure: The way it works is totally self-consistent, in other words you won’t see the scale change for a certain type of edit:

• If it’s a raw file, the Temperature scale for the entire image is always Kelvin. This remains true for images I go back to when the last edit was years ago, it never just switches to -100 to +100.  
• If it isn’t a raw file,  the Temperature scale for the entire image is always relative -100 to +100. 
• If it’s a mask, the Temperature scale for the mask is always relative -100 to +100. When you exit the mask and return to the entire image, the Temperature scale once again depends on whether that image is or isn’t raw. So if you exit the mask and it’s a raw file, the Temperature scale goes back to Kelvin.

I cannot reproduce what you describe in my Version 9.0.   When editing a RAW file the Color panel allows me to change WB between Default presets, Slider, or enter a Kelvin number, at any time when editing a raw file.

If the image is not RAW then the number can only be changed -100<>+100.

Are you editing a RAW file? What is C1?