This is a yaf render with cached pathlight, global photon light, hdri lighting.
Post processing in gimp: saturation, brightness, and contrast.
Comments? Crits?
Cheers, 
block01cube
Wow-- looks great! The smaller version of the picture looks photo-real to me. The bigger version, however, has some antialiasing problems in some lines within the glass, I think. Also, the blurred stuff at the top looks weird and a bit solarized-- that’s probably a compression problem?? Don’t know.
I’m also not sure what the glasses are supposed to be on…pebbles or something? The whole image is a bit too blurred in my opinion.
Overall, very good-- I especially like the reflections. 
–Colin
I echo what effstops said, the smaller one is very good, and with a little technical work the bigger one would be great. People say it too much, but, if you get the chance, that would make a really good YafRay tutorial, it uses many non-Blender-integrated features of YafRay. Anyway, nice work.
Howdy :D:D. The blur is a result of rendering the picture very darkly (I could only see the reflections on the cups) and then messing big time with the saturation, brightness, and contrast in gimp. The less contrasty (:P) details lose detail.
I’ll write a little thing here on hdri lighting tomorrow morning.
Cheers,
block01cube
It just struck me: The proper thing to do would be to follow the same process but to render it at some rediculously high resolution like 1600 x whatever and scale it down. Then the big render would look like the little one ;).
Cheers,
block01cube
Well done. 
that looks very real, good job
mystery
Looks great. Though I agree that the blur may be a little too strong to block out the surface that the glasses are resting on.
Any chance we can see just a simple render without blur and post processing?
The smaller picture is really good, and quite photoreal except for the blur. You could use a nice focalblur, that would make it rock!
OK: I wrote up a quite tut on hdri lighting in yaf: https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22004.
I don’t have the original renders anymore. The important thing is that they were very very very very dark.
For the lighting I used the rnl_probe from the hdri site I mention in the tutorial.
Cheers!
block01cube