Quote - If you're just making a still image, post work is fine. I'm more interested in animation than still images. So for me... "Postwork" is kind of a dirty word. You try painting over imperfections in 24 picture in such a way that the paint over doesn't dance around when you animate that 1 second animation and you'll understand.

You may be surprised to know that a lot of work you see in big budget FX and CG animations is 'postworked' by hand. A typical render of one frame for this kind of work takes anywhere from 4 to 8 hours and a human cleaner can do the work in minutes per frame. 'Dancing' is not an issue at all, since many compositors have tools specially to do overpaints and corrections without artifacts of this sort.

This used to be one of the most lucrative fields in CG cause it was largely no-brain work anyone could do and get a decent wage. Of course now its all outsourced to cheaper coutries, but thats life.

Quote - People like postworking an image made from a 3D program. I dislike postworking. Its either you can 3D an image perfectly with skill, or not at all.

But the thing is, nothing we do in 3D is pure 3D. We always rely on 2d textures, bumps, environments and so on, and in the end we output as 2D as well. So whats the difference whether you enhance your work before or after a render ? In fact you may even think of post work as being one more 'rendering' step, albeit a hand driven one.

I agree about postworking marketplace products though. That's just plain deceit.