Just thought I would start a thread for people to share their post-render process as to what they do to images to spice them up before they post them. I think this would be a good topic so new people can see how others create their finish product and help newer people learn how improve their works. 

Well, I play a lot with the images in Photoshop.

I use Daz3d to make the render. Always two or threen renders per image, with different lights.

Then I put all together in Photoshop, change borders, soften details (skin and textures), illumination, ...

At the end each image is unique so don't have a fixed path.

That is a good technique, especially for new people. I also use multiple layers, Rendering out each light separately and putting them together in Photoshop. This allows you to control the intensity of the lights better. For new people to the 3D world this technique AkibaStudio mention is a good way if you are struggling with lighting. 

Things I do as mentioned above, is I duplicate layers and change the new layer to screen and play around with it to make it pop a bit. Then I will play with the levels to adjust contrast and brightness. I will even do this on each light layers to get different effects with my lights. Then I have several photoshop actions that will give different effects such as soften the image, make it look dreamy, or add a glow. Even Have some Actions that will give me a comic book look. 

I would like to learn how to use some of Ron's brushes I purchased to use them effectively in my post-work. I just have problems with trying to get them to blend into the image well. 

I tend to really dislike doing postwork so I avoid it as much as possible. I pump out a lot of renders relatively quickly though so there's inevitably a few renders with poke-through or lighting artifacts that need to be touched up. Ocasionally I'll add some small shadows to an image after the fact but ideally I like to get the image as "perfect" as possible within Poser so that there's minimal doctoring needed after the fact. 

I want to clarify I use a lot of post production because I like the mix of 3d/illustration finish. 

At first tried the pure 3d stuff. Am married with a professional 3d artist so she showed me a lot of options. But as I started to do the images as a way to illustrate my own videogame wanted a less realistic finish, more saturate, smooth areas, and thicker edges. 

So after a lot of trials I think found my own style. Some people like it. Others not. But I think is now my style after years using it.

Regarding Ron brushes I tried them a couple of times. But still not decided if for me the best is to add them into the textures of the model or later in Photoshop. Still testing. 

In the past, I tried to get the perfect image just using the render so I can post more and not worry about post-work but realized the render engine is not enough to get your images to the next level and get that 3d/illustration finish as Akiba stated. I am still trying to find my own style and been playing around with the comic/sketched type look and been playing with some new tools for that, but tend to fall back on the quickest way to get the best image possible so my style seems to be all over the place. To me what makes someone a good artist is I can look at the gallery page and without looking at who created It I can tell who made it. Some examples are Crisp1, tab, ulyssesheart. Their image style just stands out.

I really admire those that can use paintbrushes in photoshop and really create something wonderful like painting hair, clothing, or even figures from scratch, but I was never blessed with drawing skills so that is why the 3d world is my tool of choice.

One other really good photoshop technique that I find useful is using mask layers. Dreamlight has some great tutorials on rendering in layers and using masks to lighten darken and fix issues with renders. So another piece of advice for new people is to learn to use mask, they are time savers. 

I'm curious, would you guys do a lot of post-work for every image? I know some might require more than others, obviously, but I often look at some of the images on this site - particularly contest entries - and think to myself "is it even possible to make something that good using nothing but Daz?" I mean, what would the Daz-Post-work ratio be? 90% Daz, 10% post-work, something like that?

I can only speak for myself, but I hardly ever do any post-work... Of course, I don't have much skills in Photoshop or other programs so it's limited what I can accomplish, but I never feel the post-work makes my renders any better that they are fresh from rendering (and I have tried, many times :-). 

The short answer is no lol. Daz does not provide many of the necessary features to make stuff look really good. Their bloom filter sucks, the tone-mapping for color control and color grading sucks, their vignette sucks... the list goes on.

My renders are not as eye-popping as many are around here.  Perhaps if I took the time to really dive into Gimp and learn what's possible, I'd be able to move into that top echelon of renderers.  

Now, having said that, generally I use Gimp in post-production for 1) image brightness, 2) image colour saturation, 3) image sharpness, and 4) to add a copyright tag.  There are also the odd times when I'll fix a poke-through in post, but I usually prefer to fix those in Daz and re-render.  Oh, and there are times when I'll add a background image in post.

My post-prod process really changes from set to set. The one thing I do for every set is to use the Adobe Camera Raw filter in Bridge/Photoshop to make all the images look as 'even' as possible with regards to exposure, highlights, shadows, etc. From there it honestly kinda depends on what I think fits right for the set. Are the images a bit too 'punchy' with regards to color and skin tone? Add a tone curve to apply adjustment to the shadow areas to bring that under control and then bring the Brightness up a tiny bit. Maybe need better contrast control? Use Color Dodge and Color Burn layers to help with that. Got a color that's a tad bit out of control? Hue/Saturation layers are your friend.

Daz Studio is honestly pretty shit in a lot of regard with regards to image control. So I try to get as much right as I can in my initial renders and then use PS to dial in the final touches. Overall from an editing standpoint I really go for a subtle editing style. If the steps I take do add something to an image without being distracting... and viewers can't tell EXACTLTY what I did... then I probably did my job right. 

I don't use poser or daz. I sculpt my characters from scratch, pose them in zbrush, bring them over into 3dsmax, render them after lighting (using hdri's and scene lights), then export as an open exr or a tiff, even png;s hold a lot of light and dark information. You then can look at using LUT's after balancing your tones in Photoshop. I usually render bloom, dof, bokeh and aerial perspective (fog or depth haze) in the render. It makes thing look photo real.

I really like the feedback on this post, and see people's thoughts on this topic. It seems the consensus is how much postwork is needed to make an image pop and I guess How much is too much that destroys an image. For me Less is more, So I try to get my lighting and what not correct in Daz (sometimes this means rendering each light in layers which really sucks). Once I am in photoshop I usually just play with the levels and add some Actions I have collected over the years depending on the feel I want to try to get out of the image. 

I would love some the talented postwork artist who have patron accounts do video or something on the postwork process. To some that maybe boring for people to sit and watch someone working for hours in photoshop but to me I find it fascinating to see how others minds work. 

I do all my scenes in Blender. My style is cel shaded and depends completely of the scene lights, but there's also a lot of CRT screens andold computer  displays, and I use Photoshop for integration.

Comic composing and lettering is made in Illustrator, a software I really really hate 

This is really subjective but quite frankly, unlike the many others in this thread, I tend to post 1-2 images at a time as opposed to entire sets or multiple ones. Thus those 1-2 images are focused on various Photoshop modifications in mind. So I tend to not let my 9-10 years of Photoshop use go to waste. Though probably because I "hardcore hobbyist" things too much but in reality I spend about 30 minutes text refinement, artifact clean up, some brightness here or there, sometimes I even do some masking in Photoshop to make other things stands out like as if it was movie/game box poster of sorts and others mainly for glamour when need be. A couple are set up solely for presets when rendering in Daz is done. I enjoy it though!

Lately, I would say most of my posts are 90% renders and 10% postwork. To be honest I wish I had the time to really dive in and make it more 50-50. I have tons of tools for photoshop I have collected over the years especially brushes, but never really got good at using them yet. I tend to rely on Daz to do the heavy lifting that comes to a lot of work sitting in folders unfinished because I was never happy with how the lighting turned out the way I envisioned my work. If the lighting is not perfect I push the project aside until I figure out how to get it right and move on to something else. 

As far as photoshop goes, I mainly use it to fix brightness and contrast and play with some filters that give it a soft dreamy look at times, or use filters that give it a comic book type image. I will also note that sometimes I render lights in their own layers and compile them together in photoshop this helps you have more control over your lighting by brighting some lights while dimming others or changing light colors.

With me it's the opposite now as I only started using Daz last year, though inittally I tried to 6 years back gave up, I'd say I have only about 8 months of experience with it. However to be fair, with the memory and graphics card I have, my renders are 1 hour tops so it's why I can just easily get things done, go the Photoshop and then upload next but lately I have been doing more editing in Daz than elsewhere so... it is what it is. :P

I'm a graphic designer by day, so a lot of my professional experience has involved editing and compositing images. Doing postwork is often faster for me than setting something up in-engine. I generally commit to 2-4 renders of a scene to splice together. Most scenes are pretty simple and don't require much beyond balancing out levels, but some specific things are way easier to do in post (like leaking fluids) than in Daz, especially if I'm only shooting one angle. I typically spend about a half hour in post unless I'm doing something really ambitious.

Also, my work features a lot of really huge boobs. A limitation of Daz's collision system / smoothing modifiers is that they can only detect one colliding object at a time. I frequently want more than just one kind of object to collide, so I usually commit to compositing a few renders of an image with each collision active to make the final piece.

I do post-processing a lot. I render in Daz and do postwork in Affinity Photo. My goal is to give a painting-like feeling to my art. I do at least follow things, all my tricks are not listed here :) .

- Brightness/shadow levels.

- Color perspective and depth blur with depth canvases.

- Add vignette.

- Add slightly noise for giving the last touch for an image.

My post-processing takes 20%-30%.

I think there is no too less or much for post-processing, it all depends on what is your goal and style.

normaly i am trying to render in RAW and finailizy the lightning also in RAW Render without post editing. 99 % my renders are RAW.

So it is easier for afterworks when it needed.