Now i'm doing static images too  . it's fun. 

Well i dnt have Photoshop full. i have pshop elements. It has nice tools and i like it.

What do you guys do with it (postwork)and how?

So far the only things i can think are painting things like

1. tears 2)moustache , beard 3)Fix poser clothes by painting and fillilng gaps   4)Put extra hair 
   5)Make bruises 6) put a bit of blood  for cuts or scratches

7)Put grass in front of  feeet , so it looks like the character is really in a grassy place

If you plan accordingly, you can create your background separately, then composite it with your main character and give it a slight blur to suggest depth of focus. You can also add shadows and highlights in places where Poser may have, for whatever reason, chosen not to put any. Only other thing I can think of offhand is you can play with colour, desaturate it a bit: real world colour is never as bright and intense as Poser may make it.

docandraider.com -- the collected cartoons of Doc and Raider

I use Paintshop Pro 8 but basic postwork stuff in PS or Elements can be simply through the use of layers (psd format).

For example, you could use a photograph (royalty free please) for a backgound layer, a Poser image for your main character (I export in png format to get a transparent background), another image for a foreground layer (grass mound, etc) and yet another layer for an effect (smoke, fog, etc).

Different effects and parameters can be applied to the different layers and you can have different versions of the same basic image for comparisons - perhaps with different backgrounds, etc.  You can also scale the image to fit the background image.

It could be useful in another way to composite a number of Poser characters into a single image.  Poser complains if you try and use multiple characters and don't have enough memory.  So you could create each character separately in Poser and import into individual layers to create a single combined image.

Hope this gives you a few ideas.

it would be a lot quicker to list the things that postwork can't do to improve on a poser render.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3191109

More tips in this earlier thread.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon

The main thing I use postwork for is softening around the edges of figures & DOF. Even subtle touches can give it that extra feel of realism.

They arent especially geared towards realism, but most of the images found on my website pages of illustrations for GILGAMESH (http://www.joey-aristophanes.com/gilgamesh.html) had anywhere between 12 and 18 layers each. The exception was the Flood image, which only (only?) had 10. And all this doesnt include channel work as well, but not many people use channels that much anymore.

Just an FYI as to what can be done in post-op.

docandraider.com -- the collected cartoons of Doc and Raider

anything visual is possible with image editors.  if you can display it on a screen, you can create it with an image editor.  it may take loads of time and skill, though.  is there anything in particular that you're interested in improving?

the big thing i notice you skipped is color correction.  the reason many images look more realistic in black and white is the lack of realism in the colors.  desaturation can help, but there are a lot of other aspects as well.

my gallery has varying levels of postwork.  let me know if there's any effect or some such that you'd like to know more about.

Lights, lighs lights. Rather than fixing in post, try squeezing as much out of the render as possible. Using a real picture as a guide, see if you can match the lighting, the pose, the composition. Reality is usually far more complex than anything rendered.

I can only agree with replicand. Start off with the lights. They make or break the result.