I have made one decent try at making an aluminum repaint but it's just not like the ones I have seen for American Airlines repaints for various planes. Here is my first try.http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/9864/74...airlines3uu.jpgI have looked at the bitmaps that three or four others people have done including the one for the 737 by PMDG but I just can't seem to figure out what they have done to make it look like that. I have done respectable non-aluminum paint jobs but I don't know what to do here. I looked at some tutorials but they didn't help.

Looks pretty good to me :) . I'll be watching this thread...Jim

Tom,I would try adding a bit of blue.See the difference:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/149053.jpgCheersThomas

Here is another attempt. This time I took the texture from a picture of an American Airlines jet and put it on the 747. I had do do a little reworking to make it fit. There is probably some tweaking I could do to make it better.

Ok I'm done, I think. Here's how I did it with Photoshop. I took an orginal picture of an American 757. I stretched it until the aluminum above the stripes was about the same size as the 747 above the stripes. It would have been easy from here if there wasn't an upper deck. Next I used the cloning tool to fill in the gaps and fill in everything under the stripe. I just tried to use my best judgement as to what area to clone. Then I used the burn tool to darken the very top of the plane becaue it was looking too uniform. I used the dodge tool to get the reflection or white area on the upper deck and lighten the side of the plane below and around the upper deck windows. It was a little dark there. I also used the dodge tool to make the reflection on the word American. It took at least 4 tries to get something I liked but hopefully you won't have to try as many differnt things as I did.

Alot (probably most) of the AA schemes you see do come from real photos, its really only the best way to get the reflections looking real. Looks like you did a good job there :)

Yep. that's looking pretty good there, Ralgh. Looks like you nailed it in that last shot.Jim

Thanks. Now I have to do the Freighter version. Shouldn't be to hard to get there from here.