Attached Link: Final image in gallery

I don't know if anybody will find this of interest, but I thought I'd post a side-by-side comparison between the first render I did on a drawing and the last to see the differences. I wound up changing less of it than I initially thought. I spent half a day working on a different pose and composition. Initially, I liked it better, but as I kept going back and forth between the two images, the more I liked the original layout. Changes I was making to the new Poser file had to be redone on the original. I tried adding a reflection map to the knight and it didn't seem to make much difference, so I've got to play around more with that to find out why it didn't work. I tried different textures on the Ogre, but went back to the first. I did use a different AofD texture on the battleaxe because the first was odd looking. I added a shield to the knight. The biggest change, from the starting image was adding a couple spotlights, a purple one behind the Ogre and a green one to the side of the knight, to add some highlights to the characters to bring them out more from the background. I probably should add another behind the Ogre because I didn't quite get the effect I wanted. Poser doesn't give much of a feeling for how the lights are working, so it's frustrating trying to get the effect I want because the renders take so long. This is one area where I hope DAZ Studio does a better job of real time effects. The only other significant change is using curves in Photoshop to enhance the overall colors. Since there was minimal flesh tones in the image, I increased the tonality of the greens and blues and that gives the Ogre a much more painted appearance. I used strong "S" curves to push the contrast up. The axe blur was a Painter "camera motion blur". Painter is the only program I know of that has this neat effect because it creates a blur using the motion and speed of the mouse drawing the effect. That allows creating a curved blur. I did it on a layer and it blurred the whole image, but a painted mask limited the blur to an axe swing motion. I'm still a lot more comfortable with 2D drawing programs than 3D software, but I'm getting results that are finally nice enough to continue investing time in Poser and stuff. I still want to learn how to use 3D modelling programs to create my own models, but there's only so much time in a day. I've been downloading and buying enough Poser content that it makes more sense to focus on developing drawing skills with the program and using the stuff I've got than spending even more time to do everything from scratch.

Welcome to the wonderful world of "post work". :o)

I guess I don't consider twenty minutes of some quick corrections as being "post work" when I compare it to eight hours of producing an image. It really is post work, but it's a few quick things to enhance what was considerably more effort.

post is anything you do after production... that being, your render. like in the movie industry, (where the term is borowed from) post-production are things like editing, adr, enhancements like cg and other optical effects.