Any tips on improving this one?
I’m not happy with it, but cant seem to identify why exactly 
Cafe-J-26-01 by Phil Grayston, on Flickr
Most of the modelling is done in ArchiCAD, hence the facets on the table tops. Lens effects & Fog all done with in post.
Comments welcome
Is it a daylight scene or nighttime? If it’s a daylight scene, the lights are too bright and the sky illumination is not natural; if it’s nighttime, there’s too much skylight.
Overall I think the lighting is too even to be realistic.
Best regards,
Vlado
It is supposed to be daylight, you can just see the burnout of the Skylight hitting the floor by the chairs on the left.
I’ll turn the lights down
well maybe i can help you.
the image looks ok, yet it lacks AO ambient oclussion. this will give the image more weight.
Also maybe for a more dramatic effect, you could try to give it one bright light.
like the sun. and then additional lighting from the spots you have.
but the most what is lacking is weight from the shadows.
Lights turned down, and a little play with gradient mapping in PS
What do you think?
Heartspace-02 by Phil Grayston, on Flickr
I think it’s a definite improvement.
I think having a blue hue to the areas lit by sky, and a warm (circa 3000k - 4000k) light on the interior might just emphasise the different areas. Use the camera white balance to compensate for overly yellow lighting, which will in turn adjust your outdoor lighting to a more blue hue.
Try to play with some DOF, now everything is on focus and looks unrealistic.
Thanks for that
I have the IES lights set to 4500k, Power at 8k. Camera WB set to Neutral and a HDRi doing the outdoor lighting.
Image sampler AA is: Adaptive, Min rate of 6, VrayLonczosFilter at 2.0. Adaptive Image sampler Min 1, Max 16.
The render times are pretty long with this one though at 3000px wide. I’m not sure exactly how long but it’s several hours with 3 machines chipping in to the DR..
Good point. Though I think this is rendered with DOF but at f8 it’s minimal, obviously too minimal.
DOF would add nothing here and besides, would not be very realistic judging from camera settings.
Couple things I notice: There should be more daylight influencing the scene, and less artificial light. Try relighting the scene (first balance natural light to the camera, then the artificial light). The brick facade on the left and right part of the image needs some structure
(bump/displacement). The brown colour of the chairs is flowing into the brown colour of the bar, so objects are harder to discern. Chairs could also use some edge highlights to give them some detail. You could try to manage to get some direct sunlight streaming down the openings left/right for some contrast. And in the end, some people walking/sitting would warm things up 
edit: i’d turn off the DOF and not use an HDRI to light the scene, seems this lighting can easily be replaced by normal GI in your environment slot. This way it will render much faster. Also whoever before said the environment lighting should have a blue tint is right, this will get some colour contrast going.