I think postwork is an important part of CG art, I never was happy about the way a render came out from any 3d renderer, I allways asume postwork will be needed, I came in into CG of the hand of photographic retouching, and maybe that is my main interest in postwork, if a photograph allways need a retouch, how couldn't a 3D CG render need it too?, not to mention corrections, ading stuff like clothing and hair is an art itself, that I allways promised myself to try since my wife gave me my little graphic tablet, my main goal is to make my renders looks photographics, not photorealistic, that's something diferent, I'm not much interested in that, I like the fotographic feel, for that I usually add some touches of defects like blur, hi contrast, noice, hi saturations or desaturations, to get rid of the, IMO, ugly perfections of the renderers.
I'd never show an unfinished version of my works, but since I don't consider this one of my great ones I wanted to show you what I mean:
Look at the upper unretouched Daz Studio renders, my only considerable work in this picture was the lights, and 3Delight seamed to ignored it
, I used some photograpic tricks to enhance it, added blur, dramatised the contrast to add depth and changed saturation and hue of some layers to add a hot and fire feel. At the end I worked most of the time in the postwork itself (trying and trying to get want I wanted), but I thougt the picture deserved it, just to rescue it from the total mediocrity.
I think I like postwork