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I agree with Cobaltdream that professional photographers use a lot of post work, but to a certain level: you can go very far in glamour and fashion foto's but there's a line when it comes to pressfoto's.

that's because the press photos are information.  if you falsify the information in them, you're misleading people about the facts.   renders are not even equivalent to glamour and fashion, they're all the way over in art.  and photos done as art involve tons of processing.  conversely information graphics are held to the same standards of accuracy, and they're generally made with 2d tools like Illustrator and Flash.

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When I was a student I did some holidaywork in a photostudio where they made pictures for an interiormagazine. This was before photoshop was even invented, I learned there a lot of buiding scenes and all the tricks they used to make it realistic. All the postwork you had to do in those days, had to be done by hand and was very timeconsuming because you had to do it right the first time (no undo!) or you had to start over again.

There is more admiration for someone who creates a great effect in poser after several sleepless nights, then if he added it in fifteen minutes afterwards in photoshop.

Bopper.

i guess i understand the appreciation for craftsmanship, but, to me, this just sounds elitist (even if you didn't mean to be).  it's sort of like saying you can't appreciate woodworking done with power tools.   i mean, don't get me wrong, i'm all for work.  if  it looks to me like you spent 2 seconds on something (including thinking about it),  then i'm not interested.  i have an irrational hatred of lens flare, but i hate it just as much when it's a stock 3d effect as when it's a stock 2d effect.  they both look like someone didn't take the time to craft an effect.  and i hate those fake reflective water fills for the same reason. 

i definitely think you shouldn't claim no postwork and then post a photo composite.  but i don't think it's much better to proclaim no postwork, and then do a projected texture render with burned in effects and aspects that look like geometry but are actually just someone's photo.  i've seen that with relative frequency in portraits. 

so i admit a personal bias for enjoying the effects of someone's hard work, and an empathy for those who dislike the quick and easy answer.

but what really gets me in these discussions.....   to me, saying that  taking the time afterward to postwork is somehow easier than just rendering and then calling it quits is not only oddly biased towards 3d, it's acting as if the route with less work is superior.  i have about 12 or more renders that have been through extensive  (as in 30+)  test renders, and still need to be postworked.  there's not one i didn't spend weeks getting 2 to 5 hours sleep a night over while tweaking settings.  as is, i'm in the middle of taking ages on postworking 3 of them.  i'm trying hard, but  i'm still not going to be anywhere near as satisfied with my 2d work as my 3d.  at least four i've never posted because i've tried to postwork them several times, and i find i still need to advance my skills for them to be worth finishing.  i work damn slow, and i'm not the best in the world, but i kind of resent the attitude that my gallery is somehow inferior because i spend time researching and practicing various postwork techniques on top of  working harder than most to perfect the quality of my renders.  and that those who don't bother to even try to, say, correct joint problems, eye problems, hair problems, Poser figures' myriad anatomical problems, levels and balance problems, etc. are somehow superior because they didn't soil their renders with an image editor.

in my experience, fairly real or high quality renders are a hell of a lot easier than just decent painting.  and while i'm very impressed at the galleries of most in this thread and don't think i can (arguably) do any better, most of those who claim no postwork have works with issues i would have addressed in Photoshop.  i don't say that i could make them look better to their creators, but i could definitely make them look better to me.   i'm sure i have raw renders that others could improve on as well, and again, i'm not saying my gallery is in any way better.  but i's not lack of effort in Poser has me working in Photoshop, and i've never seen a render that looked actually raw that i didn't think could benefit from skilled postwork.  i exclude from that the ones that people said were raw and i could tell were photocomposites, as has been been mentioned by others.

but in the end, if it's really about effort and not about the effect, well, i don't see how this community can go on about how using someone else's models, someone else's shaders, someone else's textures, someone else's lights and someone else's poses is just as much art as anything else in CG.  if it's all about hand crafting and effort, why are we using conforming clothes and posing figures?  we should be modeling figures in their intended poses, and always from scratch.  or, really, just oil painting from live models and real props we create by hand  instead of cheating and using a computer.  i empathize with preference for hard work in art, but in the end, i  don't think it's a very defensible position.   because you're always using someone else's work, and where you draw the line is always personal and pretty much arbitrary.  is it making your own paints?  is it making is it making your own computer?  designing your own chips and motherboard?  the first computer i ever used was made by my father, who designed motherboards at the time.  i don't think it's cheating for me to use my MSI motherboard, or that it would be better if i wrote my own OS and 3d studio.
as for disappointment, well, that's personal.  what you're saying is kind of like, "that work isn't as good because the artist didn't solve the problem as i would like to, in a way i can use, and use over and over again."  that sounds like much less work than, say, learning to paint photoreal wet hair so that you can add it at will.  and it sounds as if you're judging work on how it relates to what you want to do, instead of the actual quality of the piece or the work that went into it.