Live Plants

I actually just went to my LFS today and purchased a lot of plants as I am doing the same for my fish.

The main thing is going to depend on what lighting you have.

Depends on the plants you want to grow but t5 is a good way to start. 50/50 tend to be a bit off on spectrum, they combine natural light which is what you want (around 6500k) with actinic light (10k+) for corals. Not sure if you can swap them out for plant specific bulbs but you will be happy you did. Plants cant use a lot of the blue light but algae can and will.

As far as plants to make it look natural its all up to you. I think some floating plants really make tanks look natural. Amazon frogbit is my fav floater. You could also do plants from the same area as your fish for a more biotope setup

I have two leopard ctenopamas in a planted tank, with an African butterfly fish, Senegal bichir, and kribs
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For lighting I would recommend 6500k bulbs if you plan to go with any sort of T8 lighting system, if you plan on using T5HO I'd go with the Ultra Growth Wave by Wave Point because they put out the two color spectrum's that inhibit chlorophyl A & clorophyll B within live plants. The 2 chlorophyll wavelengths for live plants are between 420nm - 460nm (blueish color), and 640nm - 660nm (red color)...

Depending on the plants you want to keep you need plant specific substrate. Not gravel or sand but dirt of something like it. What you see is a sand cap covering the soil to make it look neater and keep light dirt from getting kicked up. Depending on the plants you want to keep this may or may not be necessary depending on how the plant feeds(from roots or from water column etc) some plants can live and grow in gravel or sand but it isnt ideal. Substrates like flourite or ecocomplete will be best for most plants