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The masked adjustments change existing color, and the problem with white is that it has no color. You might say that with white, the adjustments have no color to “grab onto.” What you need to do is change that white to something darker than white.
The two things you will probably have to do in the masked adjustment are:
Lower a combination of Exposure, Highlights, and Whites as needed.
Increase Saturation.
Then the color adjustments such as Hue should have a visible effect.
In the example below, the background started out completely white, but by lowering Exposure and Highlights, I was able to make the background green. However, you may run into the limitations of how Lightroom draws the mask edge and doesn’t let you edit it, like around the leaves at the top. If you want more control over this, send the image to Photoshop.
Exception: If the image has areas that became white because of panorama/HDR merge, or because Transform/Geometry panel settings were changed, those white areas are actually transparent (empty), and no options or tools in Lightroom can edit them. Again, the answer is to send the image to Photoshop, where those empty areas can easily be filled by creating a layer behind that image, such as a solid color fill layer.
White has all three color channels at maximum, so there is no room for adding more color. The trick is to do the opposite. If you want to change a white object to red, then do not try to add red, but subtract green and blue. You can do that with curves. First, create a brushed mask and brushed over the white object, in this case the ferry:
Then select Curves for the mask adjustment and drag both the green and the blue curves half way down on the right side. This creates red as a result:
Of course you can change the hue of this color by dragging one of the curves a little further down or a little less far down.
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