Well, my first suggestion is to get 1,2, or 3 of the good Lightroom "primers", each book authored by Lightroom experts. The names are Scott Kelby, Martin Evening and Victoria Bampton and their books are widely available, just use Amazon.com as a "one stop shop". Make sure you get the current LR3 version -- you can find "outdated versions on sale, but LR 3 has "stuf" that is good to know about. Any one of the three will get you started, both with the overall Lightroom workflow and with the tool/processing in the Develop module. Believe me, at least one of those books, along with a good familiarity with Lightroom help, both the "interactive" help that you get from the menu and with the pdf version (which gets updated) that you can get online, downlod (and have as a desktop icon) will give you loads of needed info and assistance! Check out the pdf here:
http://help.adobe.com …sing/lightroom_3_help.pdf
And then, there are two good places for online training where for a monthly fee you can receive excellent tutorials in all things Lightroom: Lynda.com and KelbyTraining.com are staffed with great experts and many POTN members have been enriched by spendin some time and a bit of money at one of both of those sites.
And then, there are sites that feature tutorials and helpful articles you can check out. Adobe TV is one:
http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-lightroom-3
Scott Kelby's LightroomKillerTips is one:
http://lightroomkillertips.com/
And then Victoria Bampton runs the site LightroomQueen:
http://www.lightroomqueen.com/
Each of those sites has plenty of good stuff!
Another approach you can take is trying some of the various presets that got installed with LR. A lot are B&W/monochrome "effects" but there are ones for color as well. And, the nifty thing is, with Lightroom the presets are all visible adjustments that you can check in the various panels -- you may need to poke around a bit to find out what was done, but it could be well worthwhile!
And then, one more suggestion:
The Canon Raw processing camera that came with your camera, Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is actually a nice quick converter because, among other things, when it opens a Raw file it applies your in-camera Picture Style settings for Contrast, Saturation and Sharpening, also for White Balance and color tone, as well as Noise Reduction and other in-camera settings.
In other words, with DPP you get a Preview that is "like a jpeg"!. And, because it is Raw, you can switch to different Picture Styles, White Balance settings, etc -- you can play around!
Now, as to why I might recommend that you who are starting out with Lightroom install and get to know DPP is simply that DPP can be a reference for you in how you can approach things with Lightroom! Each Canon Picture Style applies a certain "curve" to the Raw data and then some amount of Contrast, Saturation and Sharpening. Lightroom does have "curves" available in the Calibration panel ("profiles") that you can play with, but those curves are a bit more subtle than the Canon Picture Styles. But, if you mess a bit in DPP you can get a feel -- apply a profile of your choosing in LR, and from there you can make your own choices for Contrast/Clarity, Saturation/Vibrance, and the full range of LR tools for fine-tuning tones and colors!
Well, I hope that helps you at least a bit!