Using Photographic textures in Maya for Beginners

We'll start off with some basic geometry, a shot that could be used in an advertisement. Nothing advanced, a cylinder for the soup can, a bent plane for the countertop, and a plane for the backdrop.

 

 Since we don't want our backdrop to be affected by any lights we may place into the scene later, we'll make the shader for it a surface shader and everything else a blinn.

All the textures I'm using here I found on google, if this were for a professional project I would be using assets provided or pulling from my personal texture files. Never use images pulled from the internet for anything outside of personal education.

Now to pipe in our diffuse color files into the color section of the shaders. After clicking on the appropriate checkerboard, select File from the resulting pop up window and navigate to where your image is stored.

 In order to drive bump mapping and even to identify exactly where we want the specular hits to occur through specular color, we'll have to make black and white versions of our diffuse color. Keep in mind that white is what the computer is looking to push. So in terms of a bump white pushes out and in terms of specular highlights the white portion is the only portion that will be receiving a specular hit.
Here's the original texture (we'll use this for color):

The modified map (we can use this for both bump and/or spec in this case):

The maps for the counters were a bit easier as the original file is near black and white, so I was able to use it for both color AND bump:

Once your shaders are how you want them, start assigning them to your geometry.

 

Sometimes an object has multiple materials, for example our soup can has metal under the label. As my metal shader is entirely procedural, I'll apply that first to all the geo and then select the faces the label would cover and apply my label shader only to those selected faces.

Now that we've got all our shaders assigned, time to do some quick renders in order to better tweak our shaders.

 The can's floating above the counter, the bump on the label is too high, the bump on the counter is too high, and the reflectivity on the counter is too high. Time to make some adjustments.

 Now that we've fixed the issues, time to light the scene to make sure our shaders work under something other than the camera's preview light.

 

 After lighting the scene and rendering, we'll go through another round of tweaking before calling it quits!