RAW Group shot. Now I'm stranded.

[cyracles]

Hello guys, it's me, a canon 1000d + 18-55 kitlens- wielding newbie. I recently took some group photographs. Today to be precise. I shot in raw and my files are in light room.

The big question is: what do i need to do and how much of it? I am attaching 2 images. The outdoor one is how the outside group pictures look while the one indoors is the representative of others. What do i need to do, in specific Lightroom/post-processing terms to give these images life.

It was a compositional failure for me but i'm not deterred and i'm learning on the job. Just tell me what to do in lightroom for both categories of images.
Thanks a lot.

The images are attached.

[IABoomer]

Adding EXIF data would help and is one of the critique rules.

What's your intent with these images? What's your style? What does the client want? These are the questions that will drive how much you edit these images.

If you're attempting something photojournalistic, where you want to capture the moment as accurately as possible, then maybe just a little exposure/contrast tweaking will be all that's necessary. If you want a vintage look, then maybe convert to B&W, add some grain and a little vignette, then apply a bit of a sepia or other cross-process/split-tone kind of look.

The outdoor one looks okay exposure-wise. You've obviously got a somewhat slow shutter speed, since there's blur of the hand on the guy in the front. Maybe bump the ISO up or open the aperture a bit more (keeping in mind you don't want to get too shallow a depth of field and lose focus on the back row for the front row or vice versa).

The indoor one looks like it would greatly benefit from some fill lighting so you could see details in the faces of the people. You can try to add fill light in Lightroom, but it tends to exaggerate the noise. It's better to do this at the time of shooting with some well-balanced flash. You'd probably have good luck bouncing a flash off the walls/ceiling to get some softer fill lighting with a speedlite (not the popup flash), although color casting from the walls could be fun to balance.