MAKING EYES POP!
Making eyes pop in lightroom is actually a pretty simple thing to do. When editing your photos, keep an eye out for pictures that have well lit eyes, or one where they could really stand out. In the develop section of lightroom, a bit down the adjustments panel, there's a section that edits the appearance of specific colors for the whole photo. Zoom on into the subjects eyes on the photo and examine the colors that the eyes are composed of. For those colors, and those colors only, pull up the saturation and luminosity. You can adjust the hues of the colors as well, but that's all up to you. Remember though, the best looking pictures are edited with a symphony SMALL adjustments. Also, since this method affects the whole photo, other parts of the photo that are the same color of the eyes will be affected as well, so in that case small adjustments are the only option.
SMALL TWEAKS, BIG PCTURE
The way Lightroom adjusts pictures is truly awesome. To truly be a master of lightroom, you must truly understand how it thinks. Most photo editing programs make adjustments by what pixels are close to what tint or hue, and then to either strengthen, weaken, darken, or brighten those pixels. For example, the "Blacks" slider in lightroom tells the program to find the pixels that are close to black (most likely 50% luminosity and darker), and to then darken them a certain amount according to the darkness of the pixel and the position of the slider. This basic principal of "If, Then" logic applies to basically every computer program.
If you're a few steps ahead of me here, you might have already thought about how some functions in lightroom lighten, and some darken, therefore canceling each other out. Close… But no programming degree. The people at Adobe know what they're doing, and all of the adjustments effect pixels in quite ingenious ways. EXAMPLE: It may seem that Vibrance and Saturation are the exact same thing, but they're not. I'm the kind of guy who rips apart his game of Operation when he's 5 to see how it works. So naturally, I was curious to figure out how saturation and vibrance are different. I pulled the sliders all the way over for both, and they saturated different parts of the photo, and at different ratios. Saturation makes every pixel of the photo closer to a deeper color like solid blur or yellow, etc. Vibrance, on the other hand, effects more specific shades, and darkens or lightens them ( I didn't spend too much time analyzing it).
Too put this all into a useful, more memorable thought, keep things small.
When you adjust photos, the goal is to enhance photos, not change them. The key to great photos is thinking about what sliders will team up together best to create a stunning photo. All of the adjustment are grouped together according to what they do. Most of the time, all you need to do is move the sliders less than a quarter to either side. Just remember, Small pieces create the big picture.
