A Before and After: Strictly a Lightroom 3 edit

I have never done a Before and After post, so I thought I would give it a try.  I was a good girl this Christmas and was given Lightroom 3 as a surprise.  I totally wasn't expecting it!  Thank you to my husband! It has taken me about a month to get it out of the box and get set up.  This was no small feat, since on top of getting Lightroom, I also went ahead and bought myself an external storage drive.  I took some time to figure out the best way to configure my system, and let me tell you the posts over at The Lightroom Lab are AMAZING! Their posts provided the step by step procedure so that I got it set up with my external hard drive the right way, the first time.  So so happy!


On to the before and after.  I was also given for Christmas a wonderful book by David duChemin (thank you Andrea!) that has really changed the way I approach my post processing.  I give this book a healthy 5-star rating!!! No longer am I looking to actions to make my photo look the way I want it to.  I have nothing against actions, I just think for me they have slowed the process of finding my style and how to express it in my finished photos.  

This before and after is really to illustrate a simple clean edit performed solely in Lightroom 3.   What I mean by clean edit, is that I adjusted the WB, exposure, blacks, fill, brightness, contrast, clarity, and used a medium tone curve. And a bit of luminance noise reduction, which is super impressive in LR3, followed by a more pleasing crop.  Hope you like.