The people who do photoreastic textures are using photographs of real people. There are tutorials on creating skin textures (you might want to start a new thread asking for that information to get better response to your question) and information on the forum that is wonderful. For example, Cake One has a good tutorial on using a photograph to do a face on the web http://www.cakeone.com/ and just yesterday someone posted a method of making Poser skin in Photoshop (same thing could be done in Paint Shop Pro or another program: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=860391 I'd also take a look at a tutorial like http://poseworks.8m.com/tu-tmskguide.html to see how to work with the templates. This is not a comprehensive list. You can find more on your own by running a search on Poser tutorials using your favorite search engine. I'm afraid I can't help much right now...my online service is cranky and I can't access all my bookmarks. One thing I do as a beginner is use existing textures (there impressive ones available if you do a little searching around for them) and experiment with lighting and adding details (hair, beard) to see how different it makes the characters. It's going to take time to learn how to do everything that Poser can do, and even more time to do things from "scratch." I'd suggest, mildly, to take advantage of the generosity of the Poser community in sharing their talent and utilize some of what is existing until you learn to do your own. I have found ones I like at www.creed3d.com and http://members.fortunecity.com/texturesbytuesday2/and there are others both have wonderful textures available for for free (and for sale) on their sites. I'm not not saying they are the only ones available...just that I happened to use their textures and found them to be beautiful and useful.