To compile a Lightroom 4 beginners workflow guide for tone

Question

An absolute beginner of Lightroom (like myself) will find all the sliders in the Basic Panel hard to understand and overwhelming as they are powerful tools. The purpose of this thread is to design a workflow list that a beginner can easily follow and understand when using the Basic Panel and its tone controls.
What we don’t want here is advanced explanations and techniques, just the very basics for the absolute beginner to understand and follow.
As an absolute beginner I thought I’d start of this thread with my own workflow list for the basic panel tone controls, and just to let people comment on why parts of it are right, and why parts may be wrong, and how it can be perfected. The idea in the end is to compile a perfect workflow list for a beginner to follow, with brief (not advanced) explanations of each step.
Please note that Adobe highly recommends starting at the top slider and working down the panel.
So here goes, here’s the first list (remember to follow the list in its order):
The histogram is a graph, a graphical representation of all the different tones in your image (from the darkest through to the whitest) and is displayed at the top right of the develop module. Along its bottom edge it displays the amount of tones that are in your image, with the darkest displayed on the left and the brightest tones displayed on the right. Going up the graph is the numerical level of each of those tones in your image. Ideally in any image the graph should have tones that are both near to black and near to white thus giving a full dynamic range. The basic panel tone sliders affect those tones.
Exposure (adjusts all the tones, and depending on which way you slide will make them all either brighter or darker – It is fairly linear, i.e. increasing or decreasing all tones by the same amount, but effecting the mid tones the most. It will stop short of pushing tones too near to absolute black or white and thus will cause bunching (compression) of tones in those areas if overly applied, so don’t over use it).
Contrast (Contrast between the blacker and whiter tones will be changed once you use the exposure slider, especially as the midtones are the most effected. The contrast slider is used to correct this. Increasing it pushes the darker tones nearer to black, and the whiter tones nearer to white thus increasing contrast. If you’re familiar with a curves tool, then imagine on the curves graph (not the histogram’s) an s-curve drawn around the midpoint of the tones. Tones below the midpoint are darkened, and above it are brightened).
Highlights (if after using the exposure and contrast slider you have white clipping (tones or colours that have been increased so much that they have reached white instead and can go no further) then you can recover them by decreasing the highlights slider. You can obviously use this slider to increase highlights too if you come across an image that you feel needs it, but it is used mostly as a recovery tool. Clicking the 2 triangles on each side of the histogram can turn on the clipping display, showing you when any tones become clipped).
Shadows (Used if you need to fill some of the darker tones with a bit more light, or even to decrease them depending on which way you slide).
Whites (Used to drag all the tones nearer to white, with the greatest movement affecting the brighter tones, and the least effect on the darkest tones. Increasing can help you utilise more of the possible tonal (dynamic) range).
Blacks (Used to draw the darkest tones nearer to black, effecting the blackest the most and the brightest the least).
What do you think?

Answer 1

Pbeck1 wrote: With the underexposed images I think I now just adjust the exposure until  the mid tones look like they are bright enough (then use the other sliders to control the darkest or lightest tones, i.e stretch out the ends).
That actually sounds pretty darn good to me.
Pbeck1 wrote: I only ever use the exposure slider to increase exposure, and this always seems to mean having to only increase contrast too, and never decreasing it.
Most cameras nowadays have built-in intelligent contrast reduction. But if you shoot raw (without Active D-Lighting enabled...), you may find reducing contrast can make the difference between a photo which can only have silouetted darks/black, vs. one that can have open shadows and un-compressed highlights, without resorting to such extreme values for -highlights and +shadows that the photo looks unnatural.
Also, consider replacing some of that +exposure +contrast with +whites -blacks: sometimes a worthwhile trade-off...
Sounds like you are doing pretty darn good to be such a beginner - it took me a long time to get the hang of PV2012.
~R.