This sequence is loosely inspired by Raymond Chandler's novel 'Farewell, My Lovely' (released in 1940), which depicts the second outing of Phillip Marlowe, Chandler's now-famous fictional private eye. These renders are also a nod to classic film noir actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who co-starred in a film adaptation of another Raymond Chandler novel 'The Big Sleep'!
I worked almost totally in black-and-white for these. Instead of using a filter over everything at the end, I desaturated every texture in the scene individually. This allowed me to preview greyscale values more directly within Blender's viewport.
Software used:
Blender (Hard Ops and Facebuilder add-ons were both used for this)
Marvelous Designer
Photoshop
Daz (I use Daz character models to establish poses and as avatars for the Marvelous Designer clothing--none of the clothing, faces, or hair in this scene come from Daz, though)
There are also Megascans assets filling in some of the scene's details. (After a while, building my own props gets boring--Megascans to the rescue!)