I am new to repaints, but I am getting the hang of it. I have been using Paintshop Pro 9 to do some repaints of the Wings of Power P-51, which has a paint kit. Thanks to this forum for some good advice and tool suggestions!I have tried to do some repaints on planes that do not have a paint kit. I used DXTBmp to create a targa, which I could play with in PSP.I really don't understand how one goes about repainting a plane that does not have a paint kit. Is there some way to extract or save the panel lines and rivets, or do the repainters have to draw those again by hand?Sorry if this is an ignorant question. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

The way I go about making paints for planes without paintkits is this, badged the developer into making one :-lol, but seriously.What you can do is to try and find a blank, or almost blank livery for the particular plane, remove all the "paint", so you are left with a plain white livery, then use that as your base, draw over the top with your paint on a seperate layer then using the layer properties set this paint layer to multipy, this will allow the rivets, shading as such to show through from underneath.You could also use the "magic wand" tool too select the rivets, lines etc from your blank livery, and copy them to another layer, it works but takes a lot of work and the results arent always great.Dan.

Wow! Begging does seem a lot easier!! :)I will give your suggestions a try. Maybe I will get lucky!Thank you again for your contributions to this forum, Dan. You really helped me get started with repaints. Couldn't have done it without you.HB

I suppose it depends on what paint program you're using but, I'm using PSP V5 and I usually use the "magic wand" to select the backgound (and hold down the Ctrl key to select other areas that aren't picked up with the first click) then go to the menu and invert the selection. This is to pick up the rivets and lines as Dan explaind above. Depending on which texture you're working with, this might be easier than trying to select each line and rivet individually. On backgrounds with graduated textures and lines and rivets not all that different in shade it doesn't work too well. But it's a good starting point to pick up most of the lines/rivets which you can then re-work..... Tony