Lightroom Work Critique

Well, I broke down and bought the $9.99 LR and Photoshop subscription last week and have been learning the fundamentals of LR. Last night we hosted a friend who had recently been to the UK and showed us some of his photos. He was a bit dismayed as they didn't come out as expected and were underexposed and a little out of focus. I had him e-mail me a number of pictures and have been playing around with them today. Keep in mind he is not a photographer, used a little P&S camera and the pictures are jpeg (640x478) and these are some of my early projects. Tell me what you think and be as critical and suggestive as you like. Thanks in advance.

A couple more.

The last two !

first two look good, third is a bit over done. you lost some of the highlights in the sky and i'd rather recover them than bring up the mid tones and shadows of the house so much.

Careful with the clarity slider

Keep practicing, I suggest browsing photos on Flickr or a similar service of similar subjects to see how others process their photos.

At first I thought you had overdone the clarity and or sharpening. There are very distinct bands of sharpening artefacts along the rooftops (pic 1), all around the stones (pic 2) and along the tree-line (pic 3). However a second look shows that these are present in the original images and just exacerbated by your post work. It would try to fix these using Lightrooms adjustment brush.

I think the originals being so low res doesn't help.

GI=GO