If you look at the screen capture here, my expanded History panel in Lightroom, you can see the thirty-eight steps I took working with the same image I use for this example, these two poppies in my garden.

Lightroom saves each new adjustment on top of the last. Note as well that Lightroom provides the photo editor (that's you!) a precise record of what you have achieved adjacent to the procedure you conducted: 'Plus' or 'minus' to what was originally there as a setting in the feature used. So if we consider a pair of History events here I can quickly explain how this works.

First look at History event #4. This represents part of what I initially did in the Split Toning panel here, in the Develop module: I set the Shadow Saturation slider to a factor of '14'. But there are two numbers adjacent to this notation for 'Shadow Saturation'. What does that mean? Well, the control sliders here, for Split Toning, start out at '0', no affect at all. I thought I might initially set the Saturation value at '14' to start with; so the second numeric value shows what factor that control currently is set at now that I've made my move.

Next jump up to History event #6. You will see that after I set the 'Hue' slider affecting the Shadows, History event #5, I obviously felt the saturation level here needed a bit more strength to it: I increased the 'Shadow Saturation' by an additional 10 points. So the current Saturation level for the Shadows I am controlling by way of the 'Split Toning' panel is now at '24'.

That additional information Lightroom provides here is just one more reason I find the History panel such an essential part of all that makes this application so indispensable to serious image-makers! After-the-fact we are able to return to an editing session and better understand what we were thinking, how we decided to evolve the pictures we are processing here. There is nothing comparable to the History panel in Camera Raw, the application Lightroom's Develop module is built from.

My personal method of working in Lighrroom is a combination of having achieved an understanding of how each controller laid out in the series of panels Lightroom assembled in its Develop module 'works', and then moving through each images's evolution here 'intuitively', spontaneously. Most often I get the result I expect, at times I'm provided a bit of a surprise: Equals serendipity, an integral part, I believe, in the creative process we're all supposed to be involved with in our work.

Keep in mind, everything we do here in Lightroom is amendable, non-destructive – as it is in Camera Raw to be fair. I just find the entire process in Camera Raw to be substantially less spontaneous if I want to do two things at once: Make a series of wonderful variations within whatever image I am currently working on AND to potentially gain a few new Presets I can pull out of its history of adjustments later to use as a creative departure with other pictures I will work with in the future!