Useless may be a little unkind Stwert, I do have a lot of texture on my machine (not as much as my old machine) nine times out of ten I dont have the texture for a project I have in my mind, I end up looking on the net, making from scratch in photoshop or grabbing the camera myself. Shadows can be usefull in showing the depth of a object but with a soft lighting for organics harder light for hard surfaces. I use photoshop a lot for metal texture (method colour on layers then fiters,trying to do brass at the moment on the water bucket) also I use it for random patterns like rust dirt (method scatter brush and a number of filters)..........dave