I recomend to you the Real camera addon 2.1 it is very very nice, and it gives you real valews of light to work with. You can have deep of field very easy, It may help a little with the realism. It has also autoexpose
Personally, I do not like the huge saturation biases that camera simulation does compared to what you see in the real world (heavy desaturation in brighter areas and heavy saturation in darker areas). My personal bias is a little bit towards color and using Filmic + adjustments (curves and gamma) seem to give the best balance.
Dome of Oracles has been updated with the new tonemap and the latest tweaks to my shaders in the meantime.
One thing that is really nice is how much faster Cycles is now with the new RR sampling tweaks combined with denoising, lowering the rendertime from 2 days (with a little noise left) to a fairly clean render in just half a day.
Wanted to convert Hotelier Abstracted to the new filmic based workflow (with material updates and micro-displaced tiles on the floor), the enhancement it brought makes the original not look that great.
Now it does come to mind that some of my other Cycles work has no real need for the realism the new workflow and updated materials would bring (such as A Walk of Style or A Brick of Lead). They will be left alone.
Another Way Out has also gotten the Filmic + denoise + compatible/updated materials treatment.
The Slit-Light Room meanwhile has been updated again with a better quality (and proper) layered paint material (the walls and ceiling).
Yes, I’ve been neglecting the creation of new stuff, but what really does help is all of the optimization done in Cycles in the past year (at least a 4x improvement on render-time with less noise).
Next piece updated with the latest material group node changes and filmic-based tonemapping is Vertical World of the Lost
The new tonemapping combined with compatible materials really does give that extra ‘push’ needed to really kill the burnout for good, add a decent layer of realism while keeping good color, and getting that contrast that once required me to do in post. 
I’m still looking to pull this on a few more images yes, the optimizations in Cycles in the past year really helps in accelerating the update process and I thank Brecht and Lukas both for making it possible.
Two more scenes have been made compliant with the new workflow mentioned in above posts (alongside the use of denoising and material updates, resulting in overall improvements).
The pictures above are improved versions of A Checked Conundrum and Route Pi. The latter did not need denoising at all, but the former is now a baby-bottom smooth image due to denoising that was a heck of a lot better than my attempt to reduce the noise level in the original (made with an early version of Cycles on a less powerful machine).
Now I gave Thou Art Chocolate another go with the new tonemap and material updates (was never entirely happy with it, until now).
Personally, I find the chocolate in particular more convincing. I also used a micro-texture based mix for the volume shading (giant colored blocks) to give a perfectly working even blend between a forward-scatter value and a back-scatter value (as using two shaders and a mix node will simply not work in Cycles).
There’s also new details as you can see (Jelly Beans ect…).
The overhauls with the new workflow keep on coming, with the new version of Pipeline Base Security Door. The notable improvements is a new metal shader, displacement on the floor, and a small control panel.
At first I thought I would’ve needed at least a couple of days of rendering (even with denoising), but the superior sampling brought by the Branched Path Integrator really allowed this to be done in only a fraction of the time needed for the original (and the original still had noise left over while this one is clean).
Next on the overhaul bandwagon (and looking much better as a result), Ball
The new hair material seems to really work here in my opinion (at least compared to the old one). Other changes included ditching multires and applying the hair directly to the main Beagle mesh itself instead of a separate one. I know of the limitation where you need to redo the grooming if you edit the model, but the hair by default grows using UV tangents for the direction so doing that becomes trivial.
Overhaul mania, next is a new revision of Inside the Red Locker
As with some of the others, there’s at least one new element that isn’t in the original (the cases in the corner). Also, the new shaders give it a major visual upgrade and the new tonemap has allowed for a brighter image without blowing out the highlights.
Next on the list is the overhaul of An Intriguing Room
The original was made during the time I was trying to make an improved tonemap with not so much burnout. Not only that, but I was also trying to create a material that wouldn’t make scenes like this so dark. However, the Filmic-based tonemapping with compliant materials simply enabled the use of a higher exposure to get an equally bright image with even less burnout. It’s largely noise free as well because of the new denoiser.
Like the last image, there are some changes like a re-skin of the table and some smaller changes (such as runners along the bottom of the wall). The volume cube is also far brighter due to the GGX multiscatter shading for the glass (making it correct instead of overly dark).
The Blue Interior gets a major update now.
New details, new materials, new plants, new tonemap, the works. A huge difference from the original.
Not much more to say, most of the improvements being made to these works have been described in previous posts.
Tweaked the settings for The Intriguing Room (lower the filter glossy value and make use of an old node-based filtering technique).
The result is an image with clearly visible caustics on the wall and the ceiling (yes, it even captures light effects from the mirror ring on the pillar). Denoised after 15000 samples (the more recent master branch changes from Brecht really helps in terms of performance and perhaps a little bit in the sampling).
Very well done! What I love about your artwork is that it has depth and uniqueness where as most 3d artists focus on technicalities or just an object. Your works shine with creativity, artistic expression and also quality.
Thanks, I try to avoid the idea of simply being a ‘generic 3D artist’ (I tend to find a lot of interior renders for instance kind of boring, so I might add some interesting or off-beat elements).
The fact that I sell my work also gives an incentive to do that (it gives some unique quality that sets it apart from other pieces one might have in their homes).
This looks like it belongs in a Mario videogame.
A little too high-tech for Mario in my opinion 
Anyway, did the same updating process for 21st Century Art; The Future is OLED’s.
The overall change in detail isn’t as dramatic as some of the other ones, but you will notice improvements in the tree mesh, a micro-displaced ceiling, a little power box by the transparent display, and thickness for the tiles.
Bikes of Life; - I finally got around to finishing this one after a couple months of updating older scenes. What you see here is a timeline of the various two-wheeled/pedal-powered objects one might ride at stages during his life (from Tricycles as a little tot to Recumbent bikes at an older age).
Done using the latest tonemapping and shading I have in my workflow as usual, I like how it turned out.
Onward Through the Crystal Glass has been converted and enhanced with new lighting, shading, and detail
Compared to the original, the altered and more heavily colored lighting gives it a very different atmosphere. Had to combine a long 2 day render with a couple of spot renders (due to the denoiser and BPT having drawbacks and the fact that there is a true, worst case scenario with two of the main lights (shining through a translucent surface).
Unlike previous scenes, a couple of old shader group nodes were significantly enhanced and simplified rather the replaced entirely (I couldn’t do the background object with true SSS for instance, as it would mean light can’t actually go through).
Got Water Maze; Dockland Edition enhanced (with many new details and changes)
As the original was made with a very early version of Cycles, you can easily see the massive change from the use of newer features alone. The original was also made when I had a 32 bit machine and only 2 gigs of RAM to play with (so that helped a lot too). The original also did not have the cliff, the tree, the line of X’s, the crane-like equipment piece, or the details in the metal material to ground certain objects.