I have returned from Coronado/San Diego with 10 gigabytes worth of raw photos. I am as giddy as a school girl since I received Lightroom 4 from Santa! And I have been itching to get some solid time in on some Youtube how-to’s, editing, and experimenting.
After getting THIS many photos in one outing (I didn’t have space to pack a laptop,) I wanted to establish my Lightroom as neatly as possible. By following some simple techniques I found online, I quickly discovered the gems from my trip. I always struggle as to which shot should be deemed worthy as the first…or save the “best for last.”
That being said, I found some really lucky captures and took some risks on their post-editing.
ISO 200, f/4.5, 1/125 sec
I really appreciated the comments on my post asking for a future lens, and I hope to get some level of detailed feedback on this as well 
My question is for any Lightroom users: I de-saturated all the colors in HSL after I found out how much I wanted the eyes to be saturated. I found that out by clicking the eye and increasing the saturation, then took those numbers and applied it to the orange and yellow. The remaining orange and yellow in the picture had to be removed for it to be black and white without splotches of yellow and orange. So I used the brush to de-saturate the remaining picture (for the most part, but I bet you can find some color in there pretty easily.) Thus, the actual question is, what is a more efficient way of doing this? I feel like I could somehow cut out the eye, leave that colored, and then B+W the remaining picture…
The problem is that by simply removing saturation, often it doesn’t give the best B&W conversion. But I can’t think of a better method using Lightroom only. In this case the result was good so no need to worry.
Thanks for replying, James. I’ve been going through a tutorial for Lr4 online and found that I should have done the reverse of what I did; instead of using the brush for desaturating, I should have desaturated everything, then used the brush to saturate just the eye. I ended up doing that for the copy I have on my computer.
Not quite sure how that works. If you globally change everything to -100% saturation, then the local change applied by the brush has no saturation left to increase. If you globally change everything to say -80% saturation and then use the brush to locally change to say +100% saturation it sort of works but it’s not the same as a full B&W with a coloured area. Seems to me the first way you did it was better.
However, I may be missing the point of what you are trying to achieve. What is really important is: are you happy with the result? If you are, then the method is good.
I hope I’m not teaching granny to suck eggs here but as you mentioned you are a Lightroom newbie, you do know about virtual copies don’t you. If not, read up about the feature as it is a major aspect of what Lightroom is all about and extremely useful.
No no! I AM a LR newbie and I have been following Adobe’s online video tutorials and just saw about the virtual copies. (I’m about to return to school for my spring semester and I am taking a much needed course on Digital Photo…the only required “text” is Photoshop, so I’ll be getting that down too.)
I definitely appreciate the help.