Photorealism with blender

I’m relatively new to Blender and finally figured out how to use the compositor. This brought another issue. How to produce photorealistic lighting? Let’s say I’m building a statue in a yellowish indoor environment, how can I get realistic lighting? Any tips for me? Or any tutorials you could point me to?
Thanks in advance,
John

I went through the same thing. A lot of people abandon the Blender Internal renderer and use a ray tracer such as Indigo, Yaf(a)ray or Kerkythea, or a renderman renderer such as Aqsis or LuxRender, but it is possible to get good looking photorealistic renders in Blender Internal. See Tone and Gamma Corrections for my journey into photorealism.

As to lighting, I’d recommend getting Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn

Welcome to BlenderArtists :smiley:

Without ambient occulusion it is hard to achive photorealism.