Photosourcing vs Digital Painting
As someone who is trying to build a portfolio of environmental art, what is the recommendation of how much to rely on photosourced material? I know that good textures usually need you to heavily modify the base photos to actually look good, but it still kinda feels like cheating. If you were hiring an entry level environmental artist, how much would you care about how they got their textures done?
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Now as far as photosourcing being cheating, that is just silly. If you had to make a texture of a concrete wall, you wouldn't paint every pixel by hand would you? That would be extremely slow and give you worse results than simply finding a good source to use. Often times that is the case, where starting with a photo base not only will save time but improve your work over simply hand painting everything. The trick to using photos is knowing how to edit, blend/mask them, and most importantly choosing GOOD source to start from in the first place.
Now, if you're working on a hand-painted stylized game its a bit of a different story, but even here you can use photos as a base to paint over to save time.
At the end of the day, if it improves your work, or makes your work easier, DO IT! Efficiency is one of if not the single most important aspect of working as a professional artist, about the only thing that is actually "cheating" is stealing other people's work.
Every good CG artist I know (painting, 3d,..) relies strongly on photo sources and its an accepted technique as long as it looks very good. If you make it look crap and obvious that it is traced or based on a photo then you fail and deserve to be called a cheater and or all the other things. But if you succeed with something great, then seriously who the f*** cares?