Thank you for the suggestions. Do you know of good lens setting for something natural looking like human eyes? Getting that arm to sit right is a challenge...
Unfortunately I am colorblind and do my best but it gets really confusing trying to balance things out when the colors don't make sense to me.
Totally agree about the clutter! Am working on that
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Sure. The best way is to stick to the "science" of photographers. A "Full Frame" camera has a sensor width of 36mm. In DAZ it is called "Frame Width" and can be found within the camera settings. So a Normal Lens would be around 50mm "Focal Length". Everything larger is considered "Tele Lens" (or sometimes zoom lens IMO this is a misleading name) everything below Wide Angle Lens. Tele Lenses with an approx range of 65mm were considered good for portraits, and they still are to a certain degree, but they fell out of fashion for 90+mm when it comes to high-quality portraits in magazines or fine art.
The Default Values in DAZ Studio are 36mm for Frame Width and 65mm for Focal length.
Good for close up portraits not so much for portraits with a lot of scenery around.
Change the Focal Length to 50mm.
Other typical settings would be 22,5mm for Frame Width and 32mm for Focal Length. (Normal Lens APS-C [not Canon they are special snowflakes])
Frame Width 24mm and 30mm Focal Length (Normal Lens for Canon APS-C)
And my favourite 17,3mm Frame Width and 25mm Focal Length (Micro Four Thirds) for this you will also use a 4:3 Aspect Ratio for the most photorealistic result.
Stick to this, remember always a "Normal Lens" represents the natural distortion humans experience with their eyes.
Tele Lenses help you with separation and focus on a single subject Wide Angle Lenses are more for scenery and help you to present a strong foreground and lessen the impact of the background the wider they get. And they always distort your image in a certain way.
The other settings are probably too much for now.
For your colourblindness there are two very helpful "tricks" you could use.
First, always have a small plane that is purely "normal grey" and has a matte surface. 21% grey for Canon Cameras 18% grey for the rest of the world (RGB 118,118,118). Just put it in a corner you know you will crop out later in postwork. This grey plane you can use to let the postwork program of your choice make an automatic white balance. It is important that the plane is rendered within your scene. If you are using Lightroom you could also put a pure white and pure black plane next to the grey one. Lightroom has a white balance tool that can use all three pieces of information to give optimal results. I really wish RawTherapee would also have the black and the white colour picker for white balance. After that, only enhance with the "Vibrance" slider and activate "protect skin colours" if available in your software, not the "Saturation" slider. "Vibrance" has an inbuild smart macro to pick colours for you while "Saturation" impacts every colour equal. And use it with care. Most of the time values between 15 and 25 are enough to make a difference. Your taste and experience is the key here.
The other "trick" is, to go b/w or monochrome. Depending on the kind of colourblindness there could be comfortable monochrome palettes for you to use. A friend of mine is weak on green and red, so he likes to dabble with blue schemes.
When it comes to clutter there are a lot of nice and good tips here in the thread, depending on the processing power of your rig. Billboards, Scene Optimizer and scatter tools that create instances are the most versatile options to achieve good results with reasonable impact to the render time.
Edit: It was too late for me yesterday I falsely claimed that Canon uses a 24% grey, that is wrong. They use a 21% grey for calibration.
