Hi there! maker of the Express shipping post.
DISCLAIMER: I have only been doing realistic renders for about a year. And just now getting the hang of it. And 3D for only 2 years.
As some others already noted. I don’t use a lot of layers.
It’s mostly making a render with a nice balance of light and then adding photoshop filters/colors on it.
For animation I mostly use premade LUTS found in premiere pro and in photoshop I just do some random color grading in Camera RAW and then balance the amount of light on that.
For example, here is the raw export of my post:
I do however always separate volumetrics. Since you either need an insane amount of samples or a perfect denoiser if you don’t want some weird dots in it. I create a linked new layer and set all my collections to holdout with transparent background. So I render 1 layer with no volumetrics. And then I add the volumetrics layers in compositing with the alpha over node.
Sometimes I also use the mist pass as a seperate image to use it as an mask for smoke/steam assets inside photoshop or After Effects.
Some settings I always use in camera raw or grading:
Film grain, Clarity, dehaze, and vignette/custom grain vignette.
And a bit of chromatic abberation.
And ALWAYS render it in high bit images before doing colors.
I feel honored that you linked my post, appreciate that a lot! Hope I was somewhat usefull here.