Hi,

I used to dabble in Maya a few years back ( just for fun/hobby ) and the question often asked then
was wich is the better 3D app. to use to produce final render images. Maya? , 3DSudio? Softimage? etc...
And its my general understanding that in those days the answer was that it din't matter since what
really mattered was what you did with your l image AFTER your final render. Here, for this purpose,
Photoshop was the program mostly sought after to "retouch" the rendered image. Here you could adjust
brightness, contrast, hue/saturation, sharpness etc. and this had for effect to tranform the image
into something , more often than not, into a much more acceptable/pleasant-to-the-eye looking kind of image.
( Today, I think that PhotoShop is still the prefered application for this kind of post production work ).

To tell a short story : I use Photoshop on most of my final renders to tweak several of the above mentionned
parameters to enhance my images. ( See the attached before/after images ). These operations rarely
take more than a few minutes, are easily done and are really worth the small efforts.

So I would recommend that you do the same to imrove your images if that is what you are looking for.

I purchased a new/legal PhotoShop program on eBay for less than $200 and I think was one of my
best purchases ever. On the other hand, if you do not want to disburse $ for this, you can always get a 
copy of GIMP which is a similar image-retouching application such as Photoshop and is totally free.

I must also admit that, as render engins improve in quality/accuracy, I find it more and more difficult to improve
on some rendered images ( in Photoshop ) rendered in 3D programs such as Octane Render and possibly Keyshot
( which I don' have yet ).

While I work in ZBrush on the other hand, I find that I can always improve on my final renders in Photoshop. The renders
here are more often than not, quite dark ( increasing the intensity of MatCaps rarely does the trick for me ), unsaturated
and the Antialising here sucks. No doubt things will be better in ZB5.

There's always the question of filters ( in the Render Palette one can apply after you've rendered ) but I have yet
to see an all-encompassing and practical tutorial on all of the feature available with this ZB feature. I also 
beleive that I should have AT LEAST one lesson/tutorial on using such "complex tools" before using it. The alternative
being to goof around with all the various settings ( sometimes for hours ) till you get a desired effect.
So far PhotoShop does the trick for me ( not to mention all of the Alpha maps etc..I can produce with this app.)
Hope this helps
Paleo3D