The funny thing is, I am a professional photographer and have no problem postworking the hell out of my photos for work. And I've spent a lot of time working in the film industry, including VFX, and have a ton of friends who are full time VFX artists...and I know there's no issue with postworking there.

But for some reason when I started out doing my own 3D hobby renders, I felt like I was doing something wrong if it didn't look perfect straight out of the box...like I should have the exact coloring and contrast and glow and all that without having to add it in later. I'm guessing this stems from the fact that it took me so long to learn how to do my own lighting. In the beginning, I used to render low quality flat, dull images and then completely redo them in post because I didn't know how to do better within Poser. Now I'm perfectly fine composing my own lighting and getting the look I want (or at least something extremely close to it) straight away, but I think it's just a leftover feeling in the back of my mind from the old days lol.