Keep these basics in mind:
- calibration is only useful if you have correct exposure to begin with
- correct exposure is an interpretive art, but there are a few manipulations you can do to get you close
- do not adjust any “Brightness” controls in the Print panel. Nail down correct exposure in the Develop module.
- set your screen brightness high enough to see a full range of greys from pure black to pure white.
In the Develop module...
First, set the canvas background to White by right clicking on the canvas background and selecting White. Since you are printing on white paper, you want to set your eyes to use White as an upper limit. Using grey only causes prints to look dinghy.
Next, toggle on highlight and shadow “clipping” using the J key in the Development module. Clipped highlights will show as red pixels clipped shadows as blue pixels.
Thirdly, do not use Curves. LR frees you from Curves (a hold over from PS). Begin by using the tools under the Basics panel.
LR was designed to be used one adjustment at a time, starting from the top down. “Exposure” adjusts the midtones, but I often find nailing down the White and Black points to be the most helpful first step, as they provide the boundaries within which I can then work. If you envision your photograph as a full-tone image (from pure black to pure white), then let LR help you by Auto-setting the White and Black points: simply hold the Shift key and double click on the word White; then do the same on Black.
With that done, turn your attention to the midtones - they are adjusted with “Exposure”. You could choose to Auto-set Exposure by Shift-double clicking on the word Exposure, but I rarely find it satisfactory for my tastes. Fine tune to visually correct mid-tones by clicking in the number value box (to the right of the sliders and using your cursor keys (up and down) to make adjustments as the slider is lousy for accuracy. Each tap on a cursor key will change the Expisure by 0.10. You can make 0.33 adjustments by holding Shift and tapping the cursor key.
Now for contrast. Once the above three settings are done, Auto-contrast does a pretty good job of fine-tuning Contrast; just hold Shift and double-click on Contrast. Now step back and take a look. Most photographs will snap into shape with these four settings.
Is the photograph beginning to approach what you had hoped or visualized? This is the most difficult part of processing as beginners often don’t have a good feel for what “looks good”. Try going back to “Before” by tapping the backslash key “\”. Tap it again to take you to “After”. How’s it looking?
From here on out, you will be finessing the photo. Start by raising or lowering Shadows and Highlights - again, click into the number value box and use your cursor keys (and Shift-cursor) to increase or decrease values. These will often be subtle changes, so “Before” and “Afters” become more helpful.
The rest is all tweaking and finesse based on a lot of trial and error and really looking at photographs. I found the most helpful book in all of this was the Digital Photographer’s Guide to Lightroom by Scott Kelby. I started with it years (and years!) ago and I found his visual guide to be very easy to follow.
Best of luck!