Hi all I'm new here i got the fsx fsd saratoga a week ago and downloaded the paint kit but the paint kit is not plain white textures and when i put my paint into the load manager it come up in fsx black.Has anyone had experience painting this aircraftor if someone wouldn't mind putting a couple of stripes on the aircraft for me PM me.Thanks for your imputCheersWaka172rg

I don't have that aircraft or indeed the paint kit for it, but if it is like almost every other paint kit, then it will be a layered Photoshop file (.psd format). If you are not familiar with that format then it can seem confusing, but it isn't that tough to get your head around things. Photoshop is expensive photo editing software, but you can get hold of a demo version of Photoshop that will run for 30 days (go to www.adobe.com), or alternatively you can use a free alternative to Photoshop such as paint.net (go to www.getpaint.net).The crux of paint kits in the .psd format is that they use layers. These layers can be equated to you having a sketchpad with transparent pages in it; if you had such a sketchpad, you could paint something on page one, and then paint something else on page two and so on, and you would see what was on page one as well as what was on page two when the pages were overlaid.Once you understand that, it is easy to work with a paint kit. Either Photoshop or Paint.net will allow you to access individual layers via a 'layers palette' which you can access from the menus. Any layers on a texture file will appear in the layers palette, with the top-most layer probably having the dirt or panel lines on it, and the bottom-most layer probably having the basic aircraft paintwork. You can repaint any of those layers, or even add your own new layers via the layer palette options, and similarly, you can turn off or delete layers with the palette's controls (typically this is an 'eye' icon on the palette which you click on to control whether a layer is visible or not. All you have to remember is that if you paint on a layer, it will be obscured by anything painted on a layer above it.Once you are done painting, before you can use your file in FS, you need to flatten all the layers down so that you can save your file in a format which FS can recognise. This is because only certain file formats can support layers (typically the .tiff and .psd formats). To do that, you go to the layer menu in your paint program and choose 'flatten' do merge all your painted layers into one. When you've done that, you can save your file in the formats FS recognises for textures (such as a bitmapped DXT or a mip-mapped DDS file).As with anything of this nature, if it is new to you then be sure to make back up copies of any files you mess with or replace.There is a more expanded version of all this info in a tutorial file in the AVSIM tutorials section entitled 'getting started with repainting...' which should help you. If you want to know more about Photoshop and how to use it, I would recommend going to youtube.com and searching for a series of excellent (and very funny) tutorials called 'you suck at photoshop'. They are really great tutorials. Another place worth a look for some really advanced Photoshop tutorials is www.hongkiat.comAlternatively you can come to Manchester in the UK and pay me 800 quid per day and I'll teach you an official Adobe course for the Adobe Certified Expert qualification LOLHope that helps a bit, and welcome to AVSIM by the way.Al

Wow thanks for the reply Chock and moving the post. I have a few paints under my belt now i run paint shop pro. This paint kit confuses the hell out of me no wonder there are only 2 repaints out there.Ill keep plugging along.Thanks for the warm welcomeRegardsWaka

This paint kit does take some getting used to. There are also a couple of errors. There are several repaints on AvSim and I did one which is posted at Flightsim.Ben