First attempt at Adobe Lightroom

I put a question out to my G+ community asking if anyone knew of photoshop tutorials that I could use to improve my quite bad processing abilities. I was referred to some Youtube videos created by a French photographer named Serge Ramelli. The first video I watched was a basic introduction to Adobe's Lightroom photography program. 


I do not have Lightroom. I have a program I downloaded from Apple for $3. I downloaded a trial of Lightroom to try this tutorial out and see how I liked it before I invested any money into it.


Serge starts off with a sunset photo, so I went into my photos and grabbed the first sunset picture I came across that I hadn't attempted to process yet. I hadn't processed it because it was bad. It was blurry and washed out and all around blah. I figured, what's the worst that can happen? I find out this picture is unusable and I go search for a new photo or wait until tonight and take a new one to use. 


So here is what I started off with:

I then watched Serge's tutorial (which can be found on Youtube here) and edited my photo along with him, pausing frequently to play around.

After about an hour of playing around I ended up with this:

It came out much better than I expected! I am actually pretty pleased with this picture. Of course, I would be happier if it wasn't blurry, but I softened the image and made it all a little fuzzy so that the blurriness was not so bad. All in all I am satisfied that I have saved this picture!

I think I may end up buying Lightroom. I am going to try a few more tutorials first before I make my final decision.