Wow! These are stunning. One thing that stood out to me is how natural and photographic they are.
Would you mind sharing some insights on your lighting, tonemapping and any post processing that went into these? The black and white levels are absolutely spot on, great dynamic range and no visible black crush.
Also, were the renders downsampled at all? They have a great level of sharpness and softness (if that makes sense?).
Hello.
There is really nothing strange or exceptional about it. The light is simply a cloudy hdri. Much of the softness in the light is from the curtains on the windows. For the curtains I use a rayswitch material, so I control on one hand the visual aspect and on the other hand its effect on the light. This way I have more control than using only 1 material.
Post production is also very simple. (seeing it now I might have even overdone it in some points) As the interior is quite monochrome and where white predominates, I can pass with a render with hardly any contrast (if I had different colours, this would probably have been more difficult). Normally, I just save the render in 16 bits tiff and adjust it in Camera raw. If I'm still not satisfied I adjust the lights and shadows separately with a mask. Something similar to the Sharpness method that I explain a little later.
The renders are at the original size. The only system I use to give sharpness is a high pass layer where I remove the lighter areas to avoid the appearance of halos. It may not look very clear in the pictures, but I recommend you try it
Apart from this, I just give it a little chromatic aberration by deforming the corners of the red channel, a little vignetting and I am done.