This post walks you through creating this personal project.
Lighting
I used Corona Sun and Sky system to achieve the low-contrast natural lighting coming from outside. I put the Sun in a low position and increased the size to 8 to make the shadows very soft. Also, I reduced the intensity to 0,05 to simulate the sun hiding behind clouds. I use the Corona Sun and Sky system often because there are endless possibilities of how to use it.
Below is a quick test of several options with different Sun sizes. You can see how the shadow goes from sharp to soft.
In the image below you can see the position of the Sun and what the Sun and Sky settings look like in my scene. To reduce the bluish reflections of the Sky, I desaturate it using a Color Correction map.
Materials
Materials together with lighting are in my opinion the most valuable part of each render. I always pay attention to making as much material as possible. These days there are a lot of places where you can get or buy high-quality textures. I always look for at least 4K resolution of the textures. Trust me, it makes a lot of difference compared to a smaller resolution. You can find great PBR textures at textures.com for instance. I used one of these textures for the floor material in this scene.
Render setup
I use to do just a few modifications in settings. This is what I change:
Setting up the resolution of the image
Tone mapping
Turning on denoising (0.65)
Setting up the environment light source
Turning on Rendering elements if needed (I use mostly Wire color)
Post-production
You can achieve a great result with a raw render from Corona renderer and many times it's not necessary to do any significant edits in post-production. In this case, I made just a few minor corrections in Adobe Photoshop, such as highlights and shadows, and added a slight vignette at the corners of the images. Below is a comparison between a RAW render and a post-processed one.
I hope you like this post and you'll find some useful tips or it will just inspire you.