Yeah, it only takes a small change to get totally different results…
Just tweaking the DOF will make things softer… and just switching between HDRI’s will totally change things…
I just played with the layer weight setting as well as the HDRI rotation Tweaking here and there…I played with the ground texture…I added in the Depth of Field and used and empty then changed to just the Focus plane to just slightly blur past the front of the spiral.
The whole point is what you see in his render is not what he ended up in the tutorial…he went on to tweak and adjust settings to get something HE liked…and that is all I did …