Even the best camera with the best lighting, capturing the best moment, still needs a little work to pop! That's where post-production comes in, and my favorite program for that is Lightroom. Lightroom is the app that Photoshop used to be, before Photoshop became the "everything" program. It's streamlined for photo shoots, and does that really, really well. Here are a few examples:
Raise the temperature a bit, drop the highlights, bump up the contrast and sharpen up the edges... spot check a few skin blemishes, correct for the yellow edging from the camera calibration, add a soft vignette, and POP!
Sometimes the photo itself is not ideal. It's not following the Rule of Thirds, or there's a lot of clutter. In this case I cropped the photo to remove a lot of these distracting elements.
Increasing the vibrance and upping the tint, while dialing back the highlights really helped compensate for the fluorescent lighting, which gave everything a grayish blue washout look. Using the spot removal tool, I edited out some of the more distracting wires, helping keep the focus on the musicians.
