Lightroom rookie...

Hi guys and gals. I am a novice to the lightroom and shooting RAW thing. I tried both today but it is quite the talent people have for making their pictures "pop" with post.

Here is the pic I tried to edit. I shot RAW. Critique welcome, actually it would be appreciated. Ignore the dust on the lens! hahahah

i added some sharpening, slight noise reduction and changed the WB.

Thanx in advance.

My advice would be to lower the Exposure a bit, then for the brightest highlights -- they are too bright, so pull back the Highlights slider. From there, you may want to give some "pop" to the blacks, you can try some combination of the Contrast slider, the Blacks slider and the Clarity slider.

You may want to add a bit of sharpening when you're done, just be careful that in doing so you don't cause a mess in your background. Some who have excelled in Lightroom sharpening can give hints!

Thanx for the advice. Anything positive? hahahha

There are some excellent tutorials online for Lightroom and Photoshop. The ones I used were by Julieanne Kost, and I believe they were presented by Adobe. I'm sure you can find them with a small amount of help from google. It'll be well worth your time to curl up with those tutorials and take notes as you go through them.

Start with the basic tutorials by Julieanne Kost on the Adobe website.
http://tv.adobe.com …/lightroom/show​/featured/

If you really want to get into it, spring for a couple months' worth of Lynda training, and go through the series by Chris Orwig.
It used to be a series but maybe they changed it into one long video? I haven't used Lynda in a while.
https://www.lynda.com …al-Training/187529-2.html

You'll want to simultaneously learn the Library module for asset management (importing, organizing, rating, keywording, filtering, exporting, publishing), as well as the Develop module for editing.