Could I get feedback on how to make this image look more realistic? I feel like I’m there with the fabric but not so much the side table. To me there’s something about the image which gives away it’s not real so any constructive feedback would be very helpful! Thanks!
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My first thoughts are that there are no deep shadows at all. I think the balance of the scene and materials are fantastic. If you’re using Filmic, see how it looks with the Look one up from what it is at now. You can also apply this to pre-rendered images if you saved the EXR, just load it into the image editor and check N-panel > Image > “View as render”.
If that isn’t the style you’re after, you might try playing around with some slightly different ways to light it.
Overall I love it, fantastic job.
Thank you! I used medium low contrast so I’ll have a go at rendering it as a base or medium high contrast 
I really appreciate the feedback!
It’s still washed out. Here is the render with better contrast:
I suggest you do proper color grading instead of using contrast presets and hoping that they work.
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I disagree. I think this has taken it too far.
The presets in filmic are there for a reason - they give a good response without changing the relationship between colours. They’re not the same thing as instagram filters. Getting as far as you can with a filmic preset will mean the end result will require less work and therefore less room for messing it up.
I like how this is looking. For inspiration now, on how it could be lit or edited differently, I suggest you look in some interior design magazines. I think it’ll give you that hint of realism you’re looking for.
Some tips for sub-conscious realism:
- Use a realistic aperture value and choose a focus point, even if you can’t see the depth of field.
- Use a tiny amount of chromatic aberration - the most common type is green/magenta, so you can scale the green channel of the image up by 1-2 pixels to achieve this result.
- Lenses usually aren’t perfectly sharp and clear. To get a realistic result, mix in (MixRGB node on mix) a bit of the image blurred by 1 px, and then mix in a tiny amount of the image blurred by a much larger amount. This simulates the 1. imperfect focus of lenses and 2. the glare found to some degree in all lenses.
I’ve done these three steps (faked the first with a masked blur) to show you how it might work. I then looked at some interior design images and found they almost always have some pure white in the image. I didn’t think it suited this image, but I did bring the exposure up a bit. You can do all of this after rendering in the colour management tab. Generally interiors are quite bright.
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the img looks nice, but its to illumenated !!!
and the wall and side table dont have any surface textures, thy look like plastic
Thank again for all the helpful feedback I’ll try some of these tips you given me!
I didn’t dispute that. What I suggested was that you manually adjust the contrast afterwards, because blender doesn’t give you very good feedback about the colors in your image. You said that you don’t think this image needs a white point, which is a fair thing to say. But also you acknowledge that it is a common thing for architectural images to have a white point, so i think you can see why i thought it lacked contrast.
See, I don’t think so. Using the contrast presets it’s hard to see wether or not your image has a white point or not when using blender’s image viewer, which is why I suggested you use an image editor. Blender gives you way less control during color grading compared to an image editor, which makes it more likely for you to over- or underexpose an image. You can’t isolate parts of the image easily, you can’t preview clipped highlights and shadows and you can’t (or at least it’s hard to) adjust values isolated from the saturation, so increasing contrast will always increase saturation. That’s just why i would never use blender for color grading images.
Try a texture on the wall. Also changing the wall color would cause the table to come forward.
one more thing to improve is the plant in the vase.
it looks really fake compared to the rest of the scene.
and it is an eyecatching detail so this needs some care 
looking forward to see the final image
Jarek D (DJ)