I try to keep it as linear as possible from the frame-buffer, but sometimes I tweak highlight compression a little bit, as even PS can have trouble with overburnt highlights .. Then it's just camera raw and simple adjustments layers + some custom luts for finals... back in a day I used to overdo my postpro a lot, so I want to learn from it and try to keep it very simple and subtle
Awesome, I figured you had some custom tone mapping/post processing going on. The images reminded me of Jakub Cech's work quite a lot (who uses a similar post processing setup as yourself if I'm not mistaken). I've tried going down this road in the past but it becomes a bit cumbersome when needing to rapidly iterate/tweak materials due to the VFB/final output differences.
I feel like tone mapping is one area that is hugely overlooked, so far for me Dubcat's ACES/Cannon 5D settings have gotten me the best 'out of the box' results from Corona, but still not a patch on FStorm's godly tonemapping.
What are the settings of Dubcat? Can you lead me to the discussion?
Great work with the rendering!