photo editing help

[icemountain]

I downloaded adobe lightroom 4.3 and I am having trouble editing the pictures after i take them. I shot a bunch in RAW and took them using manual mood so it was my first go at that too so I can edit it to the way it looks like as I see it in person since its impossible to take pictures under LEDs and I am coming up with crap lol This is what I ended up with after editing and it doesn't look right to me. What do you guys think?


After I upload the image to lightroom, there is a section on the side for white balance and it has temperature, tint, exposure, clarity, vibrancy, etc. to fix the image. Am I using the right section for fixing the image? After converting from RAW to JPEG, the image looses some of the quality too. Any way to keep as much of that as possible when converting image formats?

 

[MelissaKathryn]

Hey regarding switching from RAW to JPG... there isn't very much you can do except to export it as a JPG with the smallest clip of the image you can get away with at the highest quality. Always keep all of your RAW images stored somewhere. Every time you save a JPG, you lose information. It is always best to go back to the original RAW file. Also, make sure you are using a good tripod and already know where you want to focus. Some of the images look a little out of focus. zoom in as much as possible and make sure the lines are really clean.

I hope this helps! Its my best input as an art director! I still haven't played with photographing our tank. I just havent taken the time yet :-( I'll check in to see what others say!

 

[VividGreg]

A little more about exporting jpegs- you can set the compression. After you do all the adjusting you click on file>export. In the box go down to file settings and if you select jpeg in the dropdown box a quality slider pops up just to the right. If you slide that all the way to 100 you end up with a very high quality jpeg- big file size too though. Just below all that you can change the dimensions, sharpening, etc.
The 'develop' section is where you make all those adjustments you were talking about. You can do so much there- once you get the hang of the different ways to adjust color and exposure it'll just take a couple minutes to make a picture really look good.
All that said... the first picture you posted- that tricolor type acro- that's a really hard one to get looking accurate. Digital cameras just have a hard time with that deep blue so don't feel bad that you couldn't do it justice. Try playing around with shadows and highlights and the HSL [hue, saturation and luminance]. You be amazed at how much can be done in that section.