Lightroom rave, revisited :)

Have you ever looked back at pictures you edited a couple years ago, or even a year or months ago and think--
boy, I have come a long way since then!?

That's what I feel like when I look at photo shoots from just a couple months ago. My edits can be classified into pre-Lightroom and post-Lightroom. I was just going over some pictures from a newborn shoot I did a few months ago and decided to re-edit them all in Lightroom because the difference was so dramatic! I did as much as I could with free editing programs, but they just couldn't do as much as Lightroom can. Not trying to sound like an advertisement here, just want to share what I think has made such big improvements in my work in case it helps someone else out. (although if Adobe reads this and wants to compensate me for passing the good word along, I would gladly accept, ha!)

Here are a couple of examples:

This one was edited in ipiccy. It's not bad, but I couldn't address the shadows properly or get the nice, creamy skin I wanted:

Here is the Lightroom version:

 Here is another LR version, with a bit of a more dreamy feel. I like them both. What do you think?

The LR edits also took me waaaaay less time. I could even do more to it but I had a lot of editing to do, and I was pretty happy with how these turned out so there ya go.

And now, I close another episode of "Why I love Lightroom".  :)  

Thanks for reading.