Hella better.

Do you know your histogram?

In challenging light situations (like shooting into the sun) don't shoot what you can see, shoot what you can record. Obviously if the actual sun is in the frame you will have a little clipping but if the whole damn sky is white you need to underexpose, just not so much that you lose detail in the blacks.

And yes. You need to know Lightroom better than you know Gmail. You're going to spend about 1.5x as long cranking through media as you are shooting it. The better you get at doing that the better a photographer you will become.

LUTs - I had to look that up as to how it related to photography. We use them for color correction in cinematography because the big scary RAW cameras used to spit out log color and you needed to turn it into linear color before you could show it to the director and have him not freak out.

But apparently when photographers talk about shit like that, they're basically saying "I wish we could cross-process film without having to shoot film!"

YeahDON'T. It's artsy bullshit advertising crap that if the art director wants, they would have asked a looooooong time ago. Put it this way - it was the core of an iconic Gap ad campaign... fifteen fucking years ago.

Not only that but you can do that shit whenever the fuck you want. If they wanna cross color your shit once it gets to editorial they can do it without your assistance (or permission). If I were you, I'd shoot a color card

every time the light changes and then tweak it in Lightroom until it's what you need. I recommended the MacPhun stuff because there's a bunch of fucking handy shit in there: