Ive spent years chasing skin grain for print... for actual micro-detail:

• Use Leonardo.ai PhotoReal v2 Engine
• Drop CFG scale to 4.5. Lemme know if you need help with the seed.

MJ's stylization often over-smoothes skin. That same plasticky texture issue cropped up on my last shoot until I updated my setup. Honestly, Im super satisfied with these:

• Stability AI Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Base Model with detail LoRAs gives way more control over micro-details.
• Black Forest Labs Flux.1 dev 12B Model handles stray hairs and pores naturally. Flux is beating MJ for my pro high-res work tho...

Solid advice 👍

^ This. Also, I have been dealing with this exact same issue for about four months and it is honestly such a letdown. I have analyzed the output data from several of the setups mentioned above and, unfortunately, I disagree that they really solve the core problem of texture authenticity. Even with high sampling steps and custom noise profiles, the results just arent as good as I expected for professional use.

• Texture frequency still feels synthetic when you zoom in.
• Micro-shadows in the pores are completely missing or blurred.
• Stray hairs look like they are drawn on with a 1-pixel brush. Ive wasted so much time and compute money trying to get a raw, unedited look. Its super frustrating that even the latest tech still feels so plasticky when you actually look at the data... just feels like we are not there yet.

Building on the earlier suggestion, I totally get why the plasticky look is driving you nuts. Ive been through that phase where everything looks like a wax mannequin. Honestly, switching to Runway Gen-3 Alpha for my base renders changed things for me. It handles skin texture way more realistically than MJ ever did. Here is what I usually do to get those pores looking right:

• Use specific negative prompts to strip out the digital smoothing.
• Upscale using Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI v7 to bring back natural sharpness.
• Layer in some grain in post-production if it still feels too clean. It works well for my workflow because I dont have to fight the model as much. Im pretty satisfied with the raw output quality, and I spend way less time fixing skin in Photoshop now. It just saves me so much stress on tight deadlines.