I see alot of realistic looking stuff come out of blender. I have heard of photo realistic rendering. I have searched for it on this forum but came up blank. Can someone tell me how to render this best quality for a still image, or point me in the right direction?
Photorealistic rendering is an more of a combination of techniques rather than a setting. To achieve true realism one must analyze a CG image in every aspect that deems that image as “unreal”.
Understanding lighting concepts, material,texture properties and also realising that a “photo” is just an other medium with flaws and characteristics. Match those all up and you can often get images that will fool many.
I must mention though that some aspects are better addressed in post 2d enviroment rather than getting results right out of the render engine.
Still yet to use blender really but the compositor may seem the place to this.
We have an expert speaking, as it seems. Quoted for agreement.
It is not an easy goal to reach - I’m not suprised nothing showed up, it takes experience and experimenting to reach it so you better get started 
And no, only understanding Blender won’t get you there, you need to learn the aforementioned basics, too, and make observations how the real world looks and works.
Can’t add anything special but I’d also advice, to check out other software like Yafray or Indigo, too, these can be helpful to make your goal a little easier (especially Indigo which you will definitely find via a search here).
To this day, I can still do much more realistic work out of the box with Lightwave having just enough experience with the software to know how to use it. Also purchasing $500 models that are pretextured and ready to go helps a lot too. And then for those things I suck at, I can usually find a plug-in that will do it for me much faster and easier. I know that ticks off some of the purist artists out there, but I’m using LW for broadcast animations where time is money. The quicker I can do something with acceptable results, the quicker I get paid and move on to the next project.
I’ve been using Blender now since 1999 and still produce average results. Basically this stims from my complete and utter lack of artistic skills outside of using a computer. I’m more of an engineer than an artists if you get right down to it.
Blender has finally advanced far enough with enough users to do everything I need it to for creating my own animated space battles thanks to the many import scripts playing nice with LWO files.
Still there are little things that are easier in LW than blender (like explosions. I have 2 good plugins at work to make very realistic particle explosions complete with lighting effects in Lightwave) and some of the lighting stuff I had. AO has helped a lot, but people still say my works are usually “dark”. (although that might just be personal style too).
I’ve gotten better, but still it takes me twice as long to get the same results vs. lightwave.