although a fair amount of works in my own gallery too (and unfortunately) fall into this category, I personally don't like to look at a painting that offers high end photorealism regardless how much skill and effort it would require to achieve such effect. the fact that my portraits in particular, suffer from this "photography like" appearance of which the thumbnails often lead the viewers to confusion and make them think that the painting would be a photography, disturbs me till the gates of hell. thus, I've decided to work harder to improve technique, to make a broader research on the net and to get buried in tutorials to make the work on which eventually insane amount of hours are going to be spent, look more painterly, even absolutely painterly, the color palette will be the place to start.

photographers, no offense, but if I wanted to see photorealism, I'd look at photographs and not paintings. I prefer paintings over photography, unless photography is used for indeed skillfully made manipulations whatsoever, my personal taste in visual art that is.