I love Adobe Lightroom, the workflow, the interface, the whole package. However, as a Nikon owner never did I manage to get the colors to look as good as after processing with Capture NX. No doubt about the fact that Capture NX understands Nikon's white balance data much better. Of course Lightroom has camera profiles, but as far as my experience goes they don't solve the problem completely.
So the question is: did I give up on Lightroom to soon? Have you been able to get the colors look the way you like them? Have you created or discovered some third party camera profiles that you are happy with and would recommend to others?
Answer
The Adobe Camera RAW/Lightroom white balance presets have too much magenta in them (for Nikon cameras, anyway). This can skew the overall color balance, but it can easily be gotten around by creating your own presets that leave the magenta/green balance at zero.
The latest versions of the RAW engine and DNG spec support DNG profiles, which go a long way towards allowing you to get the color rendering you want. Many folks like the DNG Profiles that emulate Nikon's color modes, so you may give those a try. I was never a big fan of the Nikon color rendering though (too much cyan in skies, not to mention red/orange and blue/purple crossover problems). My preferred approach is to use a Macbeth Color Checker chart to create a custom DNG profile (which can be further tweaked to taste, you don't have to take the wizard-generated profile as-is).
Also often overlooked are the Hue/Saturation/Luminance adjustments, which can give you further control and may be more intuitive to some. And if you find yourself repeating certain adjustments on many images, you can make a preset of them.
I think once you get the hang of the options available in the ACR/LR raw engine, you should be able to get pretty much whatever color rendering you want.
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