Hello, Rob. I decided to post your request as a new thread so others can benefit from it as well (if they find it useful, LOL!). OK, here goes:
NOTE: All images uploaded are just screen captures. The original file is saved as 16-bit .tiff files for my archive.
1. This is a new image that I am going to edit for this tutorial. I will call this shot - The colorful bird. This is the shot "Straight Out Of Camera" or as what they name as SOOC.
As you can see, it is acceptable but barely. It needs some adjustments to make it pop!
2. First thing that I normally do is to concentrate on how I would want to crop the image. Since I was greatly influenced by Donald recently, I decided to go with the 5X4 crop ratio. This is the cropped version from the SOOC image:
Now, it looks more "balanced" to me. This is where the fun begins... doing the adjustment in LR!
3. This is the adjustments that I did inside Lightroom:
As you can see,
3a. I bumped the exposure a little bit to increase the brightness of the image.
3b. I recovered some of the highlights by adjusting the Recovery Slider a little bit.
3c. I want the lower midtones to have some "body" in it so I bumped up the fill light a bit.
3d. The blacks are not that saturated so I adjusted the black slider up a bit to saturate them.
3e. The Clarity and Vibrance Sliders was bumped up to increase the contrast on the midtone areas.
3f. The HSL Sliders was adjusted to either saturate or desaturate some of the colors individually based on my personal taste.
3g. Then, I corrected any lens anomalies by activating the Lens Profile Correction feature for the lens that I used to take this shot.
3h. Last but not the least, I applied luminance and color noise reduction on the image.
It is interesting to note that I did not apply any sharpening at all during the whole editing on LR. I will apply the sharpening on the last part of the whole process but not in this state.
4. Now, the final LR edited image is exported to Photoshop for final tweaking.
4a. Upon export, I did a b&w conversion copy of the image. This is the b&w version with some further adjustments on the contrast and brightness levels.
5. Now, selecting the b&w layer, I changed the blending mode of this layer from Normal to LUMINOSITY. Here is the result of the blending mode change:
This is the thing that makes the whole image look sharper and with full tonal contrast. Unfortunately, for this shot, it's a bit too bright so I decided to do some selective dodging and burning for some "drama".
6. Here is the result after the selective dodging and burning.
Does it look better now? I think so. The image is already sharper because of the high contrast effect of the blended b&w layer so I will not introduce any more sharpening on this image. I forgot to mention, while doing all of this, I am working on the 16-bit version of the image the whole time.
7. Since I only share my images via the web, I convert it to 8-bit jpeg file and I usually set the largest side to about 1500 pixels. this somehow works for me when Flickr further downsizes it to 1024 pixels as their largest dimension for a free user account holder. This is the final image with the border and signature:
Hope this helps, Rob. Cheers.