Welcome to the glorious world of post-processing. I am delighted to read a post about post-processing and from someone who wants a good, direct picture. Knowing where you want to go is extremely important. You need to develop your own photographic sensibility so look at many, many pictures, even ones that are a century old. You will learn a lot.

You can simplify your workflow. Forget about the Nikon software and jpg's. Take your raw's directly into PSE. I disagree slightly with RG and I will get into that in my specific response to his post. Here is my workflow with LR. I file my raw's by date: Year>00 month year>shoot number for the month and subject. Once imported, I assign keywords immediately. These include location and subject such as person, object and event. No one likes doing this but it sure helps when you are looking for that needle in the haystack. Apply the right camera and lens profiles.

Unlike RG, I first straighten and take a preliminary crop. Then, I am back on track with RG.

PS Color balance should be inserted here. I use the XRite ColorChecker or ExpoDisc and then apply to all similar lighting situations.

1. Exposure, clarity, tonal range, contrast, dehaze and similar controls. Raw's are usually flat compared to SOOC jpg's so I first add clarity +30 and medium contrast tonal range. A bit of dehaze may also help. These are merely starting points. You must figure out what works best with your equipment and personal style. I also use my own presets but do not know if PSE has them.

2. This step involves local adjustments. My most often used tool is the radial filter then the linear gradient, adjustment brush and spot removal tool. These are the real power of LR and, I presume, PSE. Once you are comfortable with the global adjustments, learn these.

3. Straighten non-parallel lines.

4. Remove noise and sharpen. I do not do a lot here but just in case. My go-to sharpening tool is the shake reduction filter in PS. I do not know if PSE has it. I also like the high-pass filter.

5. Review the edits and redo as appropriate. Recrop, if necessary, to the final aspect ratio if printing. Do not otherwise resize.

6. I often apply a slight negative vignette, usually between -10 and -20, to make the subject stand out more.

7. If I am exporting, I usually increase the exposure by 2/3 of a stop since my jpg's are consistently a little dark. I export either to a folder called email which I use to send to friends or to the print folder.

I also assign stars to track my progress. 1, reject, and move to the reject folder under the shoot folder. 2, unused. 3, to be reviewed again later for processing or rejecting. 4, done. 5, either outstanding or for printing. You can set LR to advance automatically after setting a star.

Between RG and me, you should be off to the races. Be patient and post your pictures here for advice. Good luck and enjoy.

If you read my very long post, you will see I am in substantial agreement with RG who is one of the very best contributors here. He does mention two important things. The HSL panel is great for modifying colors. I refer to it as the poor man's polarizer because it does such a great job on skies. The other point is that once you get used to editing raw's you will hate doing jpg's. They have such less latitude because they have fewer data that the raw's. That is why I do not shoot them unless I am traveling and want to share immediately.

I tend to leave the saturation alone. I usually get what I want through clarity, dehaze, tonal range and contrast. You can go overboard very quickly with saturation. Vibrance tends to be gently and more natural. Some people may use saturation to adjust color balance but I do not.