One of the secrets is to use photos, but use them wisely, and extract some of their detail into you texture. Not slap the photos and clone stamp it into a texture.
No need to go into depth here when others have excelled at explaining it, and on video, so here it is.
I recommend these two DVD's:
And for metal:
http://racer445.com/pages/tutorials/met ... torial.php
(Source and moar: http://racer445.com/ )
Thanks for the info, HP. I actually own both Eat3d vids along with both Fountain DVDs, they're by far the best video tutorials I've seen and definitely worth the money. In fact, I posted a thread when I finished my pillar at the Eat3d forums:
http://eat3d.com/forum/old-pillar-discu ... ted-pillar
Never managed to get the UDK to use the 2048s I made though, 1024 was the max resolution it would let me use. Last pic on there is the best, I can't setup lights worth shit 
I've had Racer445's metal vid bookmarked for awhile now, I've just never gotten around to going through it. That's more along the lines of what I'm talking about as far as creating textures from scratch goes though.
I suppose my main goal is to be able to create good base textures from a blank page in photoshop. Starting with the Racer445 vid looks like a good place to start.
There isn't really any point in painting realistic textures from scratch without photo source as it takes a long time and most likely wont have the same amount of lovely variation as nature can generate. The whole point with painting textures by hand is to avoid making it too realistic and instead lean more towards stylization and full artistic control. Like HP pointed out, it's rather about using your photos in a smart way that allows you to manipulate your own designs to make them look more like real materials.
For Kinectimals we use a range of different techniques to achieve this. The most convenient way is to use zbrush and sculpt you details and then bake different maps that you can build your base texture from (such as cavity and zbrush matcap materials). I often tend to paint on top on my base materials, and sometimes skip the whole zbrush thing and just brush my base texture directly in photoshop. To make the texture come to life however I always use photos on top, either by blending them or masking them using the Blend if. After polishing and defining the end result further, all the details comes together, giving the texture a realistic yet stylized look.
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