About this picture...
This is my (very) old desk I used to sit at. The goal here was to achieve photorealism. So everything is actually textured with photos I took of the various materials. From this point on, I've only used textures, mostly selfmade. Before this, I used procedural textures, and those just look too generated (and take longer because of that). I used a bit of colored light for the fun of it. And yes, it's very close to the real thing, imo.