In his presentation about Photoshop and Lightroom, Young McQueen stimulated our creative juices by showing us a range of effects that can be produced with these tools. He showed basic skills like resizing and cropping as well as more involved techniques like recoloring, HDR, and panoramas. Take another look at his examples, and then try some things out for yourself.
Here’s a link to the presentation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B87GoJPpIXlGOWZCT1JHd1BKcXM/view?usp=sharing
Young noted that Lightroom has a good HDR function. I have been using HDR Efex pro and Photomatix for a while and always assumed that the LR capability was not as good. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the LR function was extremely easy to use. It gave me super results with sharper and less grainy results than the other tools.
If you are looking for funky options, the old tools have a lot, but if you want realistic results, I highly recommend trying the LR HDR function.