I would pay for a tutorial / walkthrough from Juraj just to study his process.
:-) No need to pay me, I posted my approach almost every year, every time someone asked. It's true I didn't make a concise tutorial out of it, but that's because (and this answers why there in general aren't many tutorials on topic) it's not easy to concentrate and doing this properly. Some people open Twitch and ramble random stuff for 40 minutes and others, like me, struggle to make good script and follow that. I rather not produce anything that produce something that's mediocre. My CGArchitect article took me week to write..and I don't want to spend so much of my free time to CGI.
Disclaimer: I also
absolutely want both: color management (OCIO/ACES is great) and better tonemapping (ACES Filmic curve is great). I've requested these years ago. I will be super happy once we eventually get them. And we will, I've never seen any devs more receptive that Corona guys.
But.. these things aren't as radical as some people might hope for. Out of fun I googled ACES Filmic curve and google shows on first image page an experiment I did with Dubcat in 2017. He took my scene to Fusion (pure linear 32bit output) and applied ACES Filmic curve (with final sRGB output, sRGB is color space only btw, it has nothing to do with tonemapping whatsover). The other image is Corona HC8 (I guess was chosen to maximize highlights compression) plus a simple S-Curve that mainly focuses on boosting midtones (the midtones look bit more shitty because the curve was applied to clamped image in Photoshop... Corona didn't have curves in VFB yet)
The results are fairly similar. Of course, the scene lacks strong colors where the saturation would fall apart, but even this can be easily fixed in interim by using Vibrance to adjust saturation levels.
This is currently not reproducible in Framebuffer with LUT because it would requite exact translation to LOG first and applied right after in that order { Linear --> LOG ----> LUT }
I said these threads are getting weirder because there is odd militancy in responses. Lot of strange stuff is taken as fact, it's becoming quite haven for misinformation.
But for you out of interest: My current settings are sub <2 HC, Midtones boosting curve (with peak more towards highlight to avoid flatness) without toe as I like to adjust black with Contrast, which is 4-5. Then..still comes a lot of selective post-production, but this identical to my photography from that point, creative changes, not fixes. So, luminance masks, vibrance adjustment, micro-contrast enhancement, painting glares on (I don't like the current bloom&glare much and I want to boost this artificially).
Last: Great posts from Lolec!