Hey everyone, I’m working on an event space scene in Blender. I used collection instances to fill the event hall, but the camera depth of field isn’t working it doesn’t respond to either distance or object focus.
Also, I’d love some advice on how to make the lighting look more realistic
If you set the F-Stop value to something ridiculously low, like 0.1, does the DOF become visible?
If the scene or camera are at an unrealistic scale, you might have to also use an unrealistic F-Stop to match.
The lighting isn’t necessarily unrealistic, but the scene is overlit. Is the ceiling completely covered in high power lights everywhere? If so, that’s going to create a very flat and boring lighting. Though if that’s what the real place would be like, it’s realistic, it’s just that the space would look just as flat in real life.
For something a bit more pleasing, use fewer lights, but place each one more carefully to create something interesting. Shadows are important, so it would also be good if there wasn’t light coming from every possible direction. Avoid lights from behind the camera if possible, that flattens a scene and makes it look like flash photography. It might also help if the different light sources had a bit of color variation.
An other thing I see is that the white objects in the foreground look really, really white. What brightness values do the materials have? Keep in mind the default 0.8 is about as white as something could ever get in real life (brightness in Blender isn’t linear). A real life white table cloth would probably be in the 0.65-0.7 range.
Usually, the lighting installation is based on the type of lighting that is actually used.
You can use the IES lighting file or the Spot lighting.
It’s hard to say definitively because the lighting information is unknown in the current image, but there seems to be a lot of lighting and it seems to be a light spreading throughout.
In general, I think the banquet hall is bright on the table and the aisle is dark.
Of course, it could be different depending on the production method.
The best thing is to use the lighting settings that match the site.
Even if it’s a virtual space, I think it should be installed similar to the actual lighting used. 
