Quote - Impressive skin texture. I must admit I was fooled at first with the pic showing the head. I thought it was textured as well until I read your post.

I really like that your not adding specular highlights, shadows etc...I think some texture makers get carried away in detail and add too much photo reference into the texture which of course has specular highlights and shadows. It winds up looking off with different lighting than the references. I prefer a basic texture with subtle variations and let shaders drive other effects.
You can always add more detail to a base texture if need be. Not so easy the other way around.

Well, this is made from photo references, but it's only 2000x2000, and I'm taking pains to edit out as much shadow as I can. I hate it when people make "high-res, photo-realistic" textures that only look right if the lighting is the same as in the photo references. As you said, a diffuse map should have neither shadows nor speculars. It shouldn't show pores, either. That's what bump maps or displacement maps are for.

And, yeah, bump maps and the like need to be hand-painted. You can't extract them from a photo.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.