Dyanmic Shine on aircraft

[N408BN]

How does one get the Dyanmic Shine on aircraft after painting it?
Is it done with layers with Adobe Photoshop? I would like to start
painting aircraft with layers and not just convert all the bmps to
32bit. If anyone uses Photoshop 6 please tell me about layering.

[spotlope]

There are two different types of shine on aircraft. Specular lighting, or "Dynamic Shine" as I've heard it discussed before is a feature of the model itself and can't be affected by the painter. Reflections that make the aircraft appear shinier are accomplished by using alpha channels in the texture files. Alpha channels in Photoshop are separate from layers, and one can be adjusted independently of the other. With the alpha channel, black is fully reflective and comes out looking like polished chrome in FS, while white has no reflection at all. If you save the textures in a 32-bit format like Targa (TGA) or the native PSD in Photoshop, you can convert them to either 32-bit w/alpha or DXT3 using ImageTool before putting them into your FS9 aircraft's "texture" folder. With 32-bit textures there is a performance hit on some systems, but the colors will render very nicely. DXT3 allows for only 4-bit or 16 shades of gray alpha channels but the performance hit is less than with 32-bit.

Hope that helps a little!