I'm working on my first commercial characters and my primary choices for skin textures are:

• make entirely from scratch (do not have training to do this and it's going to eat days teaching myself)
• use merchant resources (I own some but they need tweaking and besides the licensing requires it)
• buy HD stock photography of model skin that's licensed for this purpose (expensive)
• photograph myself (hairy post-thirties man with suboptimal skin, not happening)

My current thrust is to combine the merchant resources with what I've taught myself already about coloration and do my best to cobble up some pore maps. To be fair, Photoshop's ability to paint meshes directly in 3-space and to paint across seams makes this a lot less arduous and I no longer need to use the blur filter to blend color shapes which speeds up reshaping them.