Lighting interior - uniform/diffuse lighting

[husherson2]

Hey folks, I have a problem with interior lighting in Corona.
When it comes to exterior lighting, things go well, with HDRi or Corona Sun/Sky. Simple setup.

But when it comes to trying to achieve a realistic look in interior scenes I can't get/understand the settings and concepts to do so.
I always get areas that are burnout (even with exposure and highlight compress) and others that are dark, and I can never achieve an uniform lighting look.

I've been trying to grasp the theory behind this, and not just simply drag and drop corona sun/hdri, and I've tried to understand what is the difference between what I am doing and the lighting setup in these tutorials for example:

https://corona-renderer.com/blog/francesco-legrenzi-interior-making-of/

https://www.viz-people.com/making-of-scandinavian-apartment/

But I cant get a result not even close from these ones. I know that Corona is very powerful, even with the simplest setup, so I know that there might be some gap in what I'm doing. 
I am going to attach simple tests that I did, these are just for training, so you can maybe spot some errors (Path tracing + UHD Cache on both).
Any advice would help.

Thanks in advance!

 

[sprayer]

just need a bit photoshop, in second example you can see the same workflow, at corona blog they make too short article, don't know why, it's not tutorial just some pics  making of

[husherson2]

just need a bit photoshop, in second example you can see the same workflow, at corona blog they make too short article, don't know why, it's not tutorial just some pics  making of

I did some post processing here (curves, levels, saturation, LUT), but it doesn't seem to add that much of realism as I've seem in other renders around here. 
My goal was to train just to achieve something like the picture I've attached

[husherson2]

I guess with the approach from this tutorial, I could achieve a nice result. Still, feeling lack of theory behind lighting interior shots.

[Jens]

I'm wondering why you are getting that extreme red/purple glow coming from the back on the edges of your image. Do you have an object there with a vray material or something else that will give that bright red glow?

Also, don't be afraid to tweak your materials to get the result you are after. You could put in a color correction node on some of them and desaturate the diffuse map.

Same thing with your light source aka the sun and sky. Play with the light temperature on both of them, you can even desaturate the sky a little.

You can also use the inverse color picker in the "color tint" option in the framebuffer, click around your image to try and get a better balance temperature wise.

Show us what you end up with :)

[husherson2]

I'm wondering why you are getting that extreme red/purple glow coming from the back on the edges of your image. Do you have an object there with a vray material or something else that will give that bright red glow?

Also, don't be afraid to tweak your materials to get the result you are after. You could put in a color correction node on some of them and desaturate the diffuse map.

Same thing with your light source aka the sun and sky. Play with the light temperature on both of them, you can even desaturate the sky a little.

You can also use the inverse color picker in the "color tint" option in the framebuffer, click around your image to try and get a better balance temperature wise.

Show us what you end up with :)

Thanks for the reply Jens. The red coming from behind was a object without any material assigned, my mistake.
Did some tweaking, desaturated hdri and played with rgb amount on the output. I see some little advance, but still I have to figure a lot of things out I guess.
(maybe model a little bit more the scene and add a few materials to see how light behaves)

[Jens]

Already looks better and yeah, all the little details adds up to making a more realistic image. It's hard (if not impossible) to nail great lighting in a scene like that. I would advice you to always test lighting on a complete scene. The light will behave and look very differently on a full scene.

In your reference, it is however mostly a wooden clad interior. So you probably need to tweak that wood material until you get something pleasing (don't be afraid to cheat a little to get the look you are after). But know, that a lot can still be tweaked in photoshop ;)

Have fun :)