I thought this was well known. Frank said it. You hand paint them. Get some brushes that look like pores and use them. Get some brushes that look like wrinkles and use them.

Get ZBrush. Read stuff from Pixar and ILM, such as the detailed description of how the textures were made for the Hulk - all hand painted.

And, for heaven's sake, if you're just going to gray-scale the color map - don't bother making a new image in gray scale. Just plug the color map into the bump channel directly. Any time you plug a colors into numbers in the Poser material room, it automatically converts it to grayscale. Don't bother loading a second copy of the map - you're just wasting resources for absolutely nothing.

Many people use an inverted gray scale of the color map, because they reason eyebrow hairs are darker and should stick up, so those should be higher, therefore brighter. This completely disregards the rest of the map, which then produces divots where the burn-in highlighs are on the photo sources. But anyway, if you really feel you have to do this egregious thing, use a Math:Subtract node to calculate 1 - color.

I suspect the handful of Poser/Daz-figure texture artist who really know how won't say because it is what makes their textures worth $30 instead of $2.99.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)