MicrostockGroup

From reading the text on the first link, it sounds like she is using actual photos and adding elements to them in Photoshop. Take a look at the reflections in the olive shot.

In the Nestle shot (1st row - 4th from the left) you can clearly see that the product (the chocolate piece) is a photo. The packaging/wrapper was added in post.

I doubt that the illustrator would go through the effort of also tracing the actual photo just to add the wrapper.


They look to me like very good post processing examples based on photos and/or 3D renders.

Is usually done  in a 3D software with post work on photoshop or corel painter.
You can visit the cgsociety.org  you'll see amazing stuff. Is more for movies and fantasy illustration but you see some realistic backgrounds, matte paintings etc.
 ...they have some online workshops courses with industry experts...I'd love to sign up for one..but $600  is quite expensive for me when I still have to finish paying my credit card debts. When I'm out of the woods, in the future I'd love to sign up for matte  painting and digital painting. However I don't know if that type of painting would be the type of "money shot".
For now, I only do vectors for microstock and my digital paintings are geared more to children's books and games.

Yes that's how they look to me too.  Photographs with an experienced illustrator's skills, eye and mind brought to them via Photoshop to overlay enhancements of light, colour etc.  Possibly some drawing involved to add extra elements that weren't in the original photograph.  Beautiful work. 

I think there is quite a grey area between highly processed photos and illustrations here.
I know of at least one micro shooter who describes himself as photo-realistic illustrator while I would call him a photographer with very strong Photoshop skills.
We're aren't (usually) talking about vectors here, where the illustration is created from scratch, but photos that have undergone polishing to make the object look perfect.

I used to call myself a photorealistic illustrator back when all my work was acylic paint and colored pencils on illustration board. I shot all the reference photos.
Now it's all digital. The reference photos become part of the illustration with enhancing done with airbrushing and cloning. All of my work is a composite.
I call it Photo-illustration.

thanks for sharing..

It may have been new to some people several months ago when this thread was active.